About 40,000 students sat the NCEA level 2 English exam on Thursday, November 15, 2026, with many completing the assessment online before a technical malfunction disrupted the process and forced a widespread reversion to paper exams.
The system failure prompted the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to offer affected candidates either additional time or an assessment grade derived from internal coursework completed throughout the academic year, RNZ reported.
“It’s a bit of a disaster,” Papakura High School principal Simon Craggs told RNZ during a morning broadcast.
Craggs said that he never possessed full confidence in the capability of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to administer digital examinations at scale, adding that Thursday’s events validated his initial reservations.
The malfunction hit schools abruptly as administrative staff initially investigated their local network infrastructure to locate the source of the outage, according to Craggs, who said that the notification arrived via an email sent at 10:03 a.m. rather than through an immediate text alert.
“It was pretty stressful for those kids during that time,” Craggs told RNZ.
The principal said that digital submission remains optional for schools, and his institution deliberately retains traditional pen-and-paper formats for subjects where paper testing remains an available option.
“The IT infrastructure at the school, the availability of devices, the reliability of devices, all those things are really contingent on everything working and lots of variable, whereas pen and paper, you give someone a new pen if it doesn’t work,” Craggs said, pointing to a lower risk of failure with physical media alongside a general student preference for writing by hand.
New Zealand Qualifications Authority deputy chief executive Jann Marshall acknowledged the technical failure in an earlier statement, noting that the digital platform failed to function as intended despite comprehensive pre-examination testing.
“We are sorry for the disruption and the stress that students, as well as teachers and parents, experienced,” Marshall said, adding that candidates had prepared extensively for the digital assessment environment.
Marshall also reported that the agency’s technology vendor provided assurances that the specific technical glitches responsible for system slowdowns and unexpected lockouts would not recur in subsequent testing sessions.
