NZ students top class in Cambridge exams

It is pouring salt into a raw wound, but 18 New Zealand students have topped world results in Cambridge International Exams.

Quite how impressive that is is hard to quantify. The British centre that administers the exams could not provide the Herald with the number of students sitting individual exams and where they were from.

Education Minister Trevor Mallard has in the past intimated that Cambridge exams are "third world" and studied in developing countries.

Schools in Bangladesh, Botswana, Gambia, Malawi, Sierra Leone and Swaziland do offer Cambridge. But so do schools in Britain, many European countries, the United States, Canada and Australia. In Singapore it has been adopted as the national secondary school qualification.

In New Zealand, Cambridge is now offered by 43 schools and 15 private training establishments. The number of exam entries has doubled in two years.

Schools that can boast students with world-beating results include Kings College, ACG Senior College, Westlake Boys High, Palmerston North High and Macleans College.

About 360,000 students worldwide sat Cambridge last year. But New Zealand students will have been competing against only those who sat the November sessions - precluding most Northern Hemisphere countries.

The qualification is favoured by many for its traditional approach to academia. It is knowledge-based, not standards-based like NCEA.

Dawn Jones, academic director of ACG Senior College, said schools adopting Cambridge had also been criticised for "running back to Mother England".

But curriculums had been developed specifically for New Zealand in subjects such as English literature and geography, she said.

It was a portable exam, accepted throughout the world and, unlike NCEA, allowed teachers to teach and students to learn without doing "nothing but assessment".

John Morris, headmaster of Auckland Grammar, said in a global community it was vital to benchmark New Zealanders against the rest of the world.

He had a "gut instinct" NCEA would not work and turned to Cambridge rather than put his students through an assessment process he saw as having little relevance to conventional academic subjects.

"Our choice to go there has been one of the most important I have made. It's also been one of the best. It's upheld our reputation," he said.