Students find English test tough

Those of us whose school years are distant history may have trouble identifying a "visual language feature" - even if it comes underlined in bright red letters.

But that is exactly what nearly 50,000 students - the largest number sitting any NCEA paper - had to do for their English level one exam yesterday.

A smaller number around the country were also tested in art history levels 2 and 3, te reo rangatira level 2 and mathematics with calculus level 3.

Among those sitting English was Mt Albert Grammar student Byron Stephenson, who found the paper difficult.

"It was just a lot harder than I expected - probably more than some exams I'd done this year."

He wasn't alone - his friends found the going tough, too.

The big stumper for Byron proved to be the unfamiliar texts paper, where students were required to read items such as poetry, magazine articles and the odd excerpt from a Shortland Street script, and answer questions based on them.

Students were quizzed, among other things, on the aforementioned visual language feature - roughly speaking, the non-word elements of an article.

This could include pictures and graphics and, to make things a bit more complicated, even words that are in bold, underlined or in printed different colours from the rest of the text.

Byron said essays and language features were key things to swot up on. "I just hadn't revised as much in that part."

But the 16-year-old thinks he went well in his formal writing, where he presented a written argument on his topic of choice, "the best education comes from what you learn outside school".

He is already looking to his final two papers, economics today and science tomorrow. "Economics is probably one of my better subjects, but I've got to study quite hard for science."*

* Today: Economics level 1, 2 and 3, English level 2 and 3, and te reo rangatira level 1.