| NZEST will run the scholarship examinations in 2002 and 2003 | ||
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| NZEST will run the scholarship examinations in 2002 and 2003.
NZEST has applied to NZQA for accreditation for 2002 and 2003. |
The Trustees would like to assure schools that NZEST will run its scholarship examination for a further two years, 2002 and 2003.
Following the announcement from the Minister of Education in December last year that there will be a state scholarship examination as part of NCEA commencing in 2004, the NZEST scholarship examinations will run for the last time in 2003, unless the new state scholarship format produces unexpected anomalies. |
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| Statement from NZEST to the Minister of Education regarding the development of the state scholarship examination | ||
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For the last ten years the New Zealand Educational Scholarship Trust (NZEST) has run examinations to identify and reward secondary-school students of exceptional ability. These independently-funded, nation-wide examinations have been run separately from the state-funded University Bursaries examinations. NZEST is pleased to continue working with the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, the Ministry of Education and other groups (the Scholarship Advisory Group) involved with the proposed New Zealand Scholarship examinations which are planned to be part of the assessment programme under the NCEA. NZEST has always supported the principle that there should be a single unified national state-run scholarship examination which will challenge the nation's most able secondary-school students. During 2001 good progress has been made by the Scholarship Advisory Group in establishing such an examination. However, there is still considerable work to be done before that examination will be in place in 2004, the year the present Bursaries examination will be replaced by NCEA at year 13 level. As long as the eventual scholarship examination format and standard provides the competitive challenge our top scholars have always enjoyed, NZEST will be pleased to support the re-introduction of the state-run national New Zealand scholarship examination in 2004. |
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| NZEST has applied to NZQA for accreditation for 2002 and 2003 | ||
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| NZEST has made formal application to NZQA for recognition of the scholarship examinations as a tertiary entrance qualification for 2002 and 2003. NZQA has acknowledged the application and hopes to reach a decision by July.
NZEST worked extremely hard in 2000 and 2001 to gain this recognition from the universities, but whilst the universities’ entrance committee approved of the standard of the NZEST scholarship examination papers, they decided not to recommend that the scholarship examinations should be accepted an a university entrance qualification. When three C passes in NZQA Bursary qualify a student to enter university, it was hard to understand this rationale, other than the Ministry did not want any New Zealand qualification to compete with the NCEA. |
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| NCEA Scholarship Subject Panels | ||
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NZEST is pleased to advise that there is a very good representation of NZEST examiners, moderators and markers on the NCEA subject panels which are currently defining scholarship parameters. It is interesting to note that the NZEST scholarship examination papers are being used extensively as scholarship exemplars. |
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