Private schools top exam pass list

Photo / Paul Estcourt

Top private schools claimed the highest percentages of NCEA passes in last year's examinations.

A table compiled by the Herald compared pass rates of Auckland schools for NCEA levels 1, 2 and 3 and showed most students passed the qualification at schools in privileged areas or at independent schools.

Most of the students at St Cuthbert's College, St Kentigern College and Diocesan School for Girls passed NCEA.

One of the reasons other top academic schools did not perform as well in comparison may have been that many of their high-achieving students had opted for the Cambridge International Examinations or International Baccalaureate instead of NCEA.

Suzanne Winthrope, acting executive head of St Kentigern, said the school had always worked hard to support the New Zealand qualification and most students did very well.

The school offers a seven-place grading scale, rather than NCEA's four-place one, so they can gain an Achieved Plus, Merit Plus and Excellence Plus.

"We find this gives our students more incentive to work harder to gain the higher grade," Mrs Winthrope said.

The school also offers the International Baccalaureate Diploma (IB) to students in Years 12 and 13.

St Cuthbert's College will start offering IB from next year but principal Lynda Reid said it would continue to be a big supporter of NCEA.

"We really believe NCEA is extremely challenging for students. It very much allows you to cope with a whole range of abilities and to thoughtfully design programmes that allow students to participate ... we really like the way it pushes the critical thinking at the top levels," she said.

Although the school has a focus on traditional academic subjects, it has used the flexibility of NCEA to design programmes to meet the needs of all students, such as web design, Mrs Reid said.

The school had seen an increase in passes and excellence endorsements from 2007 to last year.

"We were really thrilled for the kids, they did extremely well ... our goal is to get everyone over the bar and then as near as possible to that merit and excellence level."

The New Zealand Qualifications Authority does not rank schools according to their NCEA passes or the number of excellence endorsements their students are awarded.

A spokesperson urged parents to visit the authority's website if they wanted to find out more about a particular school.

This year the site provides comprehensive data that can be searched under a wider range of parameters such as ethnicity, gender, subjects, decile and standard level.

For instance, it is possible to compare the number of merit or excellent endorsements received by different schools in the same subject, and how many males from low-decile schools passed a certain subject.

Results this year are given as a percentage of the number of students who could conceivably take part in NCEA, rather than as a percentage of the school roll as was the case in previous years.

AWARDS TIME FOR TOP SCHOLARS

Top Scholar Awards were presented to the 2008 Scholarship exams' highest achieving students yesterday.

This year's top scholar was Emily Adlam from Diocesan School, who won a premier scholarship and gained the highest marks in the country in three subjects.

The other premier scholarship recipients from Auckland schools were Jingcheng Bian from Auckland Grammar, Arkesh Patel and Heath Vinicombe from Westlake Boys High, Ella Tunnicliffe-Glass from St Cuthbert's College, Timothy Vogel from Mt Roskill Grammar and Xiaoxiao Ye from Rangitoto College.

Other top scholars from around the country were Jacob Figgle from Wellington College, Kane O'Donnell from St Peter's School in Cambridge and Thomas Wilkinson from Papanui High.

These top 10 scholars receive $30,000 over three years of tertiary study.

They were joined by the top subject scholarship award winners at a presentation by Education Minister Anne Tolley and Governor-General Sir Anand Satyanand in Wellington.