KEY POINTS:
One NCEA scholarship is good, two is better ... Ella Tunnicliffe-Glass has five.
And four of them are Outstanding Scholar Awards.
The 17-year-old learned of her success yesterday when she checked her results online.
Ella, who was in Year 13 at St Cuthbert's College last year and was runner-up dux, has high aspirations.
She recently returned from a trip to The Hague where she represented New Zealand at a United Nations conference for high school students, and is about to start studying biomedical science at the University of Auckland.
She hopes to get into medical school next year, and would like to work for the United Nations some day.
The money she receives from her five scholarships will be put into a savings account or towards her orchestra's planned trip to Germany this year, she said.
Last year, St Cuthbert's topped the school rankings for the number of NCEA scholarships won, and principal Lynda Reid was happy to find out that her students had earned even more scholarships this year.
All students at the Epsom private school sit NCEA and this year 108 scholarships were awarded to the girls who sat those exams.
Mrs Reid said the school had worked hard to increase its scholarships total from 68 in 2006 to 106 in 2007.
Last year's results proved the jump "was not just an aberration".
Mrs Reid said NCEA pushed students to understand a topic and develop critical thinking skills so they could achieve at an excellence or scholarship level.
Of the 8996 students who sat NCEA scholarship exams last year, 2038 were awarded scholarships and will receive a total of more than $3.2 million over the next three years.
The awards range from a one-off payment of $500 for a single subject exam pass to the Premier Award of $30,000 to be paid over three years presented to the top 10 students.
Forty-seven students receive the Outstanding Scholar Award.
This is worth $5000 a year for three years, as long as they maintain at least a B-grade average in tertiary study in New Zealand.
Premier awards and details of school rankings according to NCEA results will be announced in May.
