“Gaming the NCEA System” or Beating the Odds? What Our Kids Know That We Don’t
- 9 hours ago
- 6 min read
by Rebecca Thomas
There’s a bad taste in the mouths of educators right now. Sharp. Lingering. Unmistakable.
NCEA bashing season continues. MLE sweeteners in the form of promised new found slush funds to make them go away. Te Tiriti being slowly, quietly, sidelined. And now, we wake up to headlines that feel more like bait than reporting.
You read it, and something inside you folds a little more.
But I promise you this — the hurt and the upset are coming to an end.
As Welby Ings said during the AEC webinar last week, “It’s hard to undo the hurt that fundamentalists like these do — but it is possible. We will recover.”
And I believe him. Because we’ve done it before.
We recover because our work is bigger than their pomp.
Because our loyalty is to people, not politics.
Because our kids are showing us the future — and it doesn’t look anything like the soundbites they’re being used to prop up.
The Real Story Behind “Gaming the System”
When adults use the word gaming, they usually mean cheating. Cutting corners. Skipping the “real” work. They say it with suspicion — with disappointment.
But our young people? They see gaming differently.
They’ve grown up in worlds where games are logic and survival. Where cheat codes aren’t cheating — they’re strategies. Workarounds. Smarts.
They don’t game systems because they’re lazy.
They game because they’re observant.
Because they’ve seen how adults build and close doors around them.
Because they’re learning, faster than we ever did, that systems weren’t made for all of us.
And so they adapt.
They find the hidden levels.
They form alliances.
They get through.
And when one of them finds a “cheat code” — a course that awards credits for the work they’re already doing, a subject that aligns with how their brain functions — we shouldn’t be shaming them.
We should be taking notes.
Two Sons. Two Paths. One System That Bent (Just Enough)
Let me tell you what this really looks like from a mother’s point of view.
Son One
He’s likely autistic. I see him clearly.
He is hypersensitive to light and sound and touch. Crowds unsettle him. The social world overwhelms him. He processes space like a Rubik’s cube — fast, nonlinear, brilliant. He can break down social dynamics, predict outcomes, and solve logical puzzles with frightening speed. But he can’t bear to sit in a room for hours filling in exam papers written by people who don’t think like him.
Traditional assessment was a breeze on his brain — but brutal on his psyche. Exams weren’t intellectually difficult for him — they were environmentally unbearable. The fluorescent lights. The echoing hall.
He found his own path through NCEA — one that included working at McDonald’s. 80 credits. Real-world application. A job that tested his stamina, his patience, his sensory tolerance. He sat in a drive-through booth inhaling exhaust fumes, wearing a uniform that itched his skin, managing people, orders, pressure, holding his nervous system together with chewing gum and grit— all while attending school part-time. And somehow, through sheer determination and will, he passed with academic honours and an excellence endorsement.
He only attended 46% of his final year.
He also chose not to attend prizegiving. Because prizegivings, like exams, were never designed for young men like him.
But did he win? Absolutely.
The system, then, before the CAA squeeze came in, was flexible enough to wrap itself around his strengths. It didn’t punish his difference. It allowed him to survive just enough— He made it work, because we let him build something of his own.
Son Two
My younger son is different again.
He has what we’d call introverted ADHD — the kind that often gets missed. He’s likely dyslexic too, though labels have always lagged behind his lived reality. He’s not loud or disruptive. He doesn’t bounce off walls. Instead, he drifts — quietly, restlessly — inside his own current of thought. The kind of energy you can’t bottle, because it moves more like smoke than fire.
He’s present. Thoughtful. But school didn’t always know what to do with that.
He attends about 90% of the time. He’s social in his own way — not because school structures suit him, but because he knows how to find the spaces that feel real. He chose Outdoor Education, not because it was a cop-out, but because it was honest. No fake lights. No desks. Just the physical world and the learning that lives in it.
He climbed a mountain with an ice axe at Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre — and came back changed. He surfed wild waves, rescued someone from a rip, and learned to read the ocean like a book.
He cracked school Wi-Fi filters with a VPN so his mates could access unfiltered internet — not to rebel, but because he could. He thinks like that. In systems. In access points.
And on top of all that?
He enrolled in extra mechanics lessons, completely outside his required credits — because he wanted to. Because he was curious. Because practical, hands-on knowledge made sense to him in ways classrooms didn’t.
He didn’t get any recognition for it. No extra credits. No pat on the back.
He just wanted to learn how things worked — how to fix a car, understand an engine, take something apart and build it again. Because that’s how he builds himself.
He went to the balls. Ran at every athletics meet. Walked in and out of school buildings with a quiet authority that said: I’ll give you what I can, but not at the cost of myself.
He didn’t “game” NCEA. He chose NCEA courses that moved with him. He sought learning that felt like him.
No external exam could measure that.
The system — before the new restrictions — still had just enough flexibility to carry him through.
Not unscathed.
But not erased either.
Two sons. Two neurodivergent learners. Neither fit the old box — and neither should have to.
They didn’t game the system. They moulded it.
What Adults See, and What Young People Actually Do
We throw around words like gaming, loopholes, pass rates — as if education is a transaction.
But for young people, especially those outside the mainstream, “gaming” is surviving.
They learn to read the room, the system, the teachers, the silences. They figure out how to navigate under pressure with the tools they have.
And when they win?
When they gain credits through meaningful work, movement-based learning, or community service?
That’s not a flaw.
That’s a feature.
That’s what happens when we give young people the dignity of choice.
The tragedy is that this flexibility — this small, humane responsiveness — is now being sealed off.
Replaced by standard. Linear. Scalable. Uniform.
But our kids? They’re none of those things.
They are beautifully diverse. They’re neurodivergent. They’re Māori, Pasifika, queer, disabled, underdiagnosed, over-scrutinised, gifted in places we haven’t even learned to measure.
And they’ve had a taste of something freer. Something fairer.
You can’t put that back in the box.
So when people say “gaming the system,” I want to ask:
What if the system was just finally flexible enough to let young people win in ways that mattered to them? What if they weren’t exploiting loopholes — but experiencing real freedom for the first time? What if the true success of NCEA wasn’t in its perfection, but in its permission?
Our Rangatahi Don’t Need a New Box
This government wants to shove them back in — back into exams, into rankings, into one-size-fits-all rigidity.
But our young people have seen another way.
They’ve tasted a model of learning that, when done with care, wraps around them like a korowai — soft, strong, and stitched with their identity.
So no, Minister.
Our kids didn’t break the system. They outgrew it.
They stretched it to fit their neurodivergent, complex, beautiful selves.
They showed us it can be done differently. Better. More justly.
And you?
You keep showing up.
You keep listening.
You keep loving young people in ways politicians don’t even understand.
So hold tight to that truth.
Hold tight to each other.
Because what they call gaming?
That’s not a problem to be fixed.
That’s genius to be protected.
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