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NCEA
 

CURRICULUM AND ASSESSMENT

Mrs B. Davidson, Assistant Principal —

How NCEA works

The National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) is the main national qualification for secondary school students in New Zealand. NCEA is recognised by employers, and used for selection by universities and polytechnics, both in New Zealand and overseas.

How it works

Each year, students study a number of courses or subjects. In each subject, skills and knowledge are assessed against a number of standards. For example, a Mathematics standard could be: Apply numeric reasoning in solving problems.

Schools use a range of internal and external assessments to measure how well students meet these standards. When a student achieves a standard, they gain a number of credits. Students must achieve a certain number of credits to gain an NCEA certificate.

There are three levels of NCEA certificate, depending on the difficulty of the standards achieved. In general, students work through levels 1 to 3 in years 11 to 13 at school.

Students are recognised for high achievement at each level by gaining NCEA with Merit or NCEA with Excellence. High achievement in a course is also recognised by course endorsements.

NZQA has a formal quality assurance process to ensure that the assessment of each standard is fair across all students, regardless of the school they attend. This includes internal moderation, external moderation and assessment system checks.

NCEA is a national qualification on the New Zealand Qualification Framework. Standards that secondary school students achieve as part of NCEA can be used as building blocks for other qualifications.

Scholarship

Scholarship is a monetary award to recognise top secondary school students. Scholarship exams are externally assessed and are an additional set of exams. They do not attract credits, nor contribute towards a qualification, but the fact that a student has gained a Scholarship appears on their Record of Achievement. Scholarship is a prestigious academic award.

There is a video explaining NCEA available on our school website under Parents and Community/ Curriculum Options.