Brooke happy with NCEA results

GOOD RESULT: Despite an error in the National Certificate of Educational Achievement level 3 statistics exam paper, Gisborne Girls’ High School leaver Brooke Armstrong felt confident she had put enough work into her study to get good results. Picture by Liam Clayton

AMONG the 150,000 secondary school students around the country to log in to the New Zealand Qualifications Authority website this morning and check their NCEA results was Gisborne Girls’ High School leaver Brooke Armstrong.

Her final Year 13 National Certificate of Educational Achievement exams went “pretty well”, she told The Gisborne Herald yesterday.

“If you’ve been on track through the year, most likely you’re going to be all right. You get out of it what you put in. We had good teachers at Gisborne Girls’ High.”

Biology and History were among Brooke’s favourite subjects at school, but she thought Statistics might have been her best subject in the exams.

However, an error in the exam paper created some uncertainty.

“It wasn’t so much there was an error that was the problem than not being sure if you were doing it right. I ended up spending too much time on it.”

The exam, sat by about 15,000 students, contained a table that added up to 121.1 percent instead of 100 percent, which made it impossible to answer the question.

A review panel has been set up to look into how the mistakes were made in the NCEA Level 3 Statistics exam, as well as four Maths exams.

“I feel reasonably confident about the exam. It will be interesting to see how it will offset the grades.

“It’s interesting the results are coming through about four days later this year than last year,” she said.

“But you can’t change anything now.”

The NCEA exam results were released online this morning. Delays were caused for some students when the system became overloaded but Brooke was in no rush, and had no problem with logging on.

“I’m pretty happy with my results,” she said.

She passed all her subjects: English, History, Biology, Geography and Statistics.

“I did better than I expected in Statistics, given how much time I spent on the error in the paper. I passed so that’s good.”

Brooke plans to study Law and Science towards a conjoint degree at the Victoria University of Wellington this year.

She is not sure what career direction to take just yet.

“I’m keeping my study broad. I’m not ready to leave education yet. My degree programme is five years so I don’t feel too rushed.”

She looks forward to leaving Gisborne to “explore other areas”.