‘Panic’: Answers vanish during major digital exam outage in NCEA English

Stressed students say a major online exam outage wiped up to 1400 words from their essays, leaving some scrambling to recover their work with pen and paper.

The outage affected the New Zealand Qualifications Authority’s (NZQA) online exam platform this morning, disrupting up to 40,000 students.

Students across the country were sitting the Year 12 NCEA Level 2 English exam when the system crashed.

The NZQA confirmed the problem with its digital exam platform was resolved at 10.35am, about 35 minutes after the issue started.

Parents, students and teaching staff said they were left panicked by the glitch, with some of those who needed assistance forced to abandon sitting the papers altogether.

One student told the Herald they were 20 seconds away from finishing an essay when the system shut down.

Another student from Carmel College had already written more than 1400 words in her first essay when her computer froze.

Education Minister Erica Stanford said she understood it was an isolated incident.

“NZQA have identified the cause of the outage and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again,” Stanford said.

She said all students were given additional time to complete the exam.

“I will be meeting with NZQA early this afternoon to ensure no student is disadvantaged.”

‘In an absolute state’

A teacher told the Herald schools were left in a “panic” during the outage.

Meanwhile, a parent said his son was sitting the Year 12 English exam when the issue struck.

“He messaged me in an absolute state as he had started the exam and then lost all his work,” the father said.

He claimed the problem was not because of “slowness” but the system “literally crashed and lost students’ work”.

The father said his son had to wait at least 30 minutes for exam papers to be handed out.

“Let’s remember these are kids who prepared for a digital exam; they aren’t used to writing paper exams … it’s not what they were prepared for.”

Another parent said they were concerned because these results would be “critical” to university acceptance and scholarships.

Many students across New Zealand who were sitting today's Year 12 English exam had to move to paper exams when a computer system crashed. Photo / NZME

One student taking the exam told the Herald the situation “deeply affected” him.

“I had almost finished my essay, like 20 or so seconds from submission for that particular one,” he said.

The student, who said he had a “handwriting issue”, had to turn to a paper exam, which added to the difficulty.

He said he was concerned the person marking his exam would not be able to read his work properly.

“I had to write the entire essay out from start to finish and lost the ability to delete mistakes, making the page look real messy.”

Unfortunately, the student said, he did not have a derived grade that could be used as he was unable to attend the mock examination because of another commitment.

The mother of a Carmel College student said that after her daughter’s computer crashed, it finally reloaded, but the body of her 1400-word essay had disappeared apart from her introduction paragraph.

“My daughter was extremely stressed with all the interruptions and loss of work, and it was impossible for her to redo the work that had been lost in the first two hours of the exam,” the mother said.

What went wrong?

NZQA said the problem related to the transfer of student responses from the exam platform to the marking platform overnight.

Earlier this morning, NZQA said it was experiencing “slowness”.

“Where students are able to continue with digital exams, they should do so.”

NZQA said if students were unable to continue digitally, they should move to paper exams where possible.

“We recognise this may not be possible in every situation. Derived grades at scale will be available for students who are unable to complete their exam.”

NZQA said derived grades were also available for students whose performance was impaired by the disruption.

‘Significant impact’

Secondary Principals’ Association president Louise Ānaru told NZME the system being down for about 35 minutes would have a “significant impact”.

“We were frantically photocopying, so we’ll definitely need to look at how we can mitigate situations like this occurring in the future.”

She said principals would be working with NZQA to review the situation and do everything they could to prevent it happening again.

“We have derived grades, so we want to assure our students, our families, that there are systems in place to be able to address situations like this,” Ānaru said.

Kiwis took to social media to express disappointment over the outage and concern for the students.

“This is wholly unacceptable,” someone wrote.

“The fact that there’s no accommodation or time or a resit opportunity when it’s a system issue is completely unfair to the kids who have worked hard to prepare for these exams,” they wrote.

Repeated computer system issues

Today’s issue comes after a Christchurch private school apologised for a “computer systems issue” that prevented Year 13 English students from completing their NCEA exam yesterday, RNZ reported.

In a letter to parents, St Andrew’s College rector Mark Wilson said there had been a significant disruption to the Level 3 English exam.

“The examination commenced as scheduled at 9.30am but was stopped part-way through following a computer systems issue,” he said.

“This was very distressing and disappointing for the approximately 120 students affected, particularly given the preparation they had undertaken for this important examination.”

Students would receive grades from their internal examination results instead.