Maths teachers are protesting after this year's Year 11 NCEA Level One exam didn't quite add up.
For the second straight year, secondary school students were left bewildered and frustrated by a test that even the brightest pupils struggled with.
Among the complaints were questions about work not covered in the syllabus and other key topics omitted from previous years, reports NZME.
Vital information was missing from some equations, while other questions were confusing and unnecessarily wordy.
Teachers are drafting a letter to the Ministry of Education and NZ Qualifications Authority with their concerns. Some have called the Tables, Equations and Graphs, Geometric Reasoning, and Chance and Data papers a "disaster".
"Honestly, the best thing one can say about this paper is that it seems to have been spell-checked thoroughly," said one teacher.
Another observed that NCEA seemed to be experimenting with a new format for the Tables, Equations and Graphs paper, but that was unfair on this year's students, whose futures depended on the results, reports NZME.
Last year, the NCEA Level One Maths Common Assessment Task left many students in tears, while an investigation found a question in the Level Three Statistics exam could not be answered.
NZQA told Newshub it's confident in the quality of the Level One Maths exam, and that it met the specifications available to schools at the beginning of the year.
Newshub.
