Tyme Shepherd has every reason to be very confident ahead of the start of yesterday's National Certificate of Educational Achievement.
After all Tyme, who is among about 5000 Northland secondary school students taking NCEA exams this month, won Tikipunga High School's principal's prize for the top Year 12 student atTuesday night's prizegiving awards.
But that didn't stop the former Pompallier College student and her Tikipunga colleagues getting in some last-minute swotting ahead of yesterday's NCEA English Level 2 exams.
Tyme said she was very confident at doing well in the exam, which she hoped would help get her into a career in law or psychology.
The 17-year-old was among about 40 students sitting the exam at Tikipunga yesterday and more than 143,000 students nationally will be sitting NCEA and NZ Scholarship exams between yesterday and November 30.
The first exams were Level 1 Media Studies and NZ Scholarship Drama yesterday.
This year's largest exam session is Level 1 English with nearly 47,000 candidates on November 16 at 9.30am. The smallest is NZ Scholarship Latin, with 29 candidates on November 21 at 2pm.
Slightly more than 1825 markers from around the country will mark all papers by the end of the year, with NCEA results scheduled to go online in the first half of January.
The result notices will not be mailed out this year so all students wanting to receive a copy in the mail will need to request it via the NZQA website at www.nzqa.govt.nz
