NZQA digital exam platform outage disrupts NCEA English exam, students lose work

NZQA confirmed the problem with its digital exam platform was resolved at 10.35am.

Education Minister Erica Stanford said she understood it was an isolated incident.

“NZQA have identified the cause of the outage and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again,” Stanford said.

She said all students were given additional time to complete the exam.

“I will be meeting with NZQA early this afternoon to ensure no student is disadvantaged.”

A parent told the Herald his son was sitting the Year 12 English exam this morning when the issue struck.

“He messaged me in an absolute state as he had started the exam and then lost all his work,” the father said.

He claimed the problem was not due to “slowness” and rather the system “literally crashed and lost students’ work”.

The father said his son then had to wait at least 30 minutes for exam papers to be handed out.

“Let’s remember these are kids who prepared for a digital exam; they aren’t used to writing paper exams … it’s not what they were prepared for.”

A teacher told the Herald that schools were left in a “panic” after the outage struck about 10am.

NZQA said the problem related to the transfer of student responses from the exam platform to the marking platform overnight.

Earlier this morning NZQA said it was experiencing “slowness”.

“Where students are able to continue with digital exams, they should do so.”

NZQA said if students were unable to continue digitally, they should move to paper exams where possible.

“We recognise this may not be possible in every situation. Derived grades at scale will be available for students who are unable to complete their exam.”

NZQA said derived grades were also available for students whose performance was impaired by the disruption.

The Secondary Principals’ Association president, Louise Ānaru, told NZME the issue would have a “significant impact” after the system was down for about 35 minutes.

“We were frantically photocopying, so we’ll definitely need to look at how we can mitigate situations like this occurring in the future.”

She said they would be working with NZQA to review the situation and do everything they could to prevent this happening again.

“We have derived grades, so we want to assure our students, our families, that there are systems in place to be able to address situations like this,” Ānaru said.

Kiwis took to social media to express their disappointment in the outage and concern for the students.

“This is wholly unacceptable,” someone wrote.

“The fact that there’s no accommodation for time or a resit opportunity when it’s a system issue is completely unfair to the kids who have worked hard to prepare for these exams,” they wrote.

Another person claimed this was not the first time something like this had happened.

“We are in 20th century! Very frustrating and not acceptable from a National platform/organisation,” they wrote.

Today’s issue comes after a Christchurch private school apologised for a “computer systems issue” that prevented Year 13 English students from completing their NCEA exam yesterday, RNZ reported.

In a letter to parents, St Andrew’s College rector Mark Wilson said there had been a significant disruption to the Level 3 English exam.

“The examination commenced as scheduled at 9.30am but was stopped part-way through following a computer systems issue,” he said.

“This was very distressing and disappointing for the approximately 120 students affected, particularly given the preparation they had undertaken for this important examination.”

Students would receive grades from their internal examination results instead.

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