Avondale College's Cambridge International exams award winners in 2024: Magali Gonzalez Mancebo, Renish Shah, Mia Horvath, Abraham Deng, Seivin Kim and Jabir Pathan. Photo / Supplied
Want to know how your secondary school performed in the most recent Cambridge exams? Scroll through the Herald’s list of individual student winners and see the awards claimed by schools as a record number of young Kiwis take the international qualification.
Finn Goodson came out of Cambridge International’s exams standing on top of the world.
The Auckland Grammar School graduate scored the highest mark of any student anywhere on the globe in last November’s Sport and Physical Education exam.
Yet 12 months earlier, he wasn’t even considering taking PE.
He’d long dreamed of being accepted into an American university as a student athlete playing squash and believed good physics and maths grades would get him there.
However, when room opened up for an extra subject during his final Auckland Grammar year, he reconsidered.
“I thought I’d be better off taking a subject that I really enjoyed and was really fascinated about, and that was PE,” said Goodson, who is one of New Zealand’s top-ranked junior squash players.
It was a last-minute choice that really paid off, he now believes.
When the Herald spoke to him earlier this year, he’d received study offers from several US universities.
And, while he was still waiting to hear back from his preferred university, he believed his Top in the World award for PE had been an asset in his applications.
He wasn’t the only New Zealand student happy to have sat the Cambridge exams.
More than 40 local secondary schools offer Cambridge as an alternative qualification to New Zealand’s home-grown NCEA curriculum.
That led a total of 8000 Kiwi students to sit November’s Cambridge exams in competition with about 192,000 other students from around the world.
From among them, 25 local students achieved Top in the World awards for the highest mark in subjects ranging from music, economics and information technology to psychology, classical studies and maths.
Overall, New Zealand students claimed 101 individual awards.
Auckland Grammar students scored the most individual awards with 23, while private schools ACG Parnell and Pinehurst picked up the next most individual awards with 22 and 20, respectively.
The awards are given out to junior students aged 14-16 taking the General Certificate of Secondary Education, and those aged 16-19 taking AS and A-level courses in each subject, where AS is the first part of the course.
Tim O’Connor, headmaster at Auckland Grammar, was delighted with his school’s “brilliant” results, saying about half its students chose to take Cambridge assessments while the other half chose NCEA.
Cambridge suited some students better because it was a “rigorous international qualification” that had allowed recent Grammar boys to gain direct entry into leading universities, such as Cambridge, Oxford and the University of Sydney, he said.
“So there’s a significant advantage to them if they can perform well,” he said.
Cambridge also gave students strong foundational knowledge and had an “academic rigour” that aligned with Auckland Grammar’s values of having its boys “fully tested at the highest level”, he said.
And while Cambridge could be stressful, given students’ university entrance hopes could be made-or-broken in the exams, O’Connor said Auckland Grammar prepared them for the pressure.
He said new Auckland Grammar arrivals start their first day at the school by taking an exam before going on to sit many more.
By the time they’re sitting Cambridge or NCEA exams, “it’s part of life and it’s not something necessarily to be afraid of”, he said.
Goodson agreed, saying he learnt how to prepare for exams in a similar way to how professional athletes prepare for games.
“Our exam preparation, our study, what we eat the night before, we know what to do – and that’s thanks to Grammar,” he said.
“It’s really treated almost as sport academics.”
O’Connor praised all his Grammar individual award winners.
That included Harry Junxi Fan, whose all-round talent led him to score the highest marks in the world in both AS Mathematics and AS Literature in English.
Daniel Zheng was another to pick up two awards, scoring the highest marks in the world for History at both the AS and A levels, while Luca Toner got New Zealand’s best mark in AS Chemistry and is now also off to university in the US.
Avondale and Macleans College were two other high-performing public schools. Both offer students the choice of taking Cambridge or NCEA.
Avondale students claimed 11 individual awards, with Seivin Kim being named New Zealand’s best student across three A-level subjects, while also scoring New Zealand’s highest score in Physics A-level.
Overall, Kim has won six Cambridge individual awards across four years.
Now a first-year biomedical student at the University of Auckland, she told the Herald she chose Cambridge for its wide variety of topics and depth of study.
Avondale principal Lyndy Watkinson said she was “exceptionally proud” of her students’ recent successes.
Mia Horvath’s Top in the World Information Technology award marked the third time she’d been the best in the country in the subject (having now won at IGSE, AS and A levels), while last year the school had the top maths scholar in all three exam levels.
Macleans College principal Steven Hargreaves said his school has offered Cambridge for 20 years and picked up seven individual awards, including in several blue-ribbon subjects.
That included Wesley Lik Hao Lau scoring the world’s best marks in mathematics at A level and Catherine En-Ping Luo achieving New Zealand’s best at AS level physics.
Lau also played in the school’s top volleyball and badminton teams, sang in the choir and was “a thoroughly decent young man, who works hard at everything he does”, Hargreaves said.
Pinehurst School principal Michael Waller said his team were proud of the 20 individual awards won by students but said everyone did well in November’s exams.
The school only offers the Cambridge curriculum and had Top in the World winners in subjects, such as Art and Design (Sonny Wu) and Global Perspectives and Research (Amelia Neal).
Wu had done incredible work with the support of Pinehurst’s teachers, Waller said, and may even end up with some of his work on school walls.
“I’m looking at three pieces of student work on the wall right now,” Waller told the Herald of the school’s move to take down traditional art pieces and replace them with pieces done by students.
He described Neal, meanwhile, as the type of young person the world needed, given her “open mind” and willingness to offer “thoughtful, balanced insights”.
Pinehurst also has an emerging star on its hands with Xibei (Percy) Kuang, who achieved the best marks in New Zealand across five subjects at the junior IGCSE level, Waller said.
Goodson, meanwhile, was hoping all the preparations and study he’s done for the Cambridge exams will have him ready to face the challenges coming up in America, both off and on the squash court.
Being accepted into university over there could see him playing squash games against players in the world’s top 10, he said.
“So it’ll be an awesome opportunity, the competition is insane over there,” he said.
Sign up for The Daily H, a free newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
The Waitākere Ranges belong to all Aucklanders, says NZ First and Act.