KEY POINTS:
St Cuthbert's College friends Zoe Butters and Zoe Dyer celebrated months of hard work after receiving top NCEA results yesterday.
Their school said the results should place the Year 13 students in the top 5 per cent of candidates in the country, but national results would not be released until April.
Zoe Butters said she was clicking "refresh" on her computer screen continuously as she waited for the results to be posted on the NZQA website at midday yesterday. Zoe Dyer, 2008 dux of the college, checked hers soon after.
An NZQA official said 800 candidates checked their results within four minutes of the site going live. Within three hours 20,000 of the 139,000 NCEA candidates had visited the site.
The friends, both aged 17, had enjoyed the summer holidays and celebrated New Year's Eve in Wellington, but Zoe Butters said NCEA was always in the back of her mind.
Because of their high marks in internal assessments, the students had all but secured an excellence certificate for NCEA level 3 before the exams, but Zoe Butters said that did not stop her pushing herself.
That attitude, as well as "a lot of study over a long period of time" and a good night's sleep before an exam are the recipe for high results, she said.
Zoe Dyer said that going into the exams she was not as nervous as she had been in previous years because she had already achieved what she needed to be accepted into university.
She achieved three excellence ratings and a merit in chemistry, two excellents and two merits in calculus, four excellents in English, three in history and four in physics.
Zoe Butters gained four excellence ratings in statistics, three in Maori, four in English, three excellents and a merit in chemistry and one achieved, two merits and one excellence in physics.
Both juggled study with a list of extracurricular activities and also sat Scholarship exams - they will receive those results in a few weeks.
They are looking forward to studying Biomedical Science at the University of Auckland this year and hope to be accepted into medical school in 2010.
