Online digital NCEA exams have been given the thumbs up in South Canterbury.

Thirteen Roncalli College students took part in the first digital exam to be offered for NCEA during this exam period - Level 1 English- on Monday.

New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) deputy chief of executive digital assessment transformation Andrea Gray said NZQA has offered schools around New Zealand the option of participating in Digital Pilot exams for three Level 1 and Level 2 NCEA subjects this year.

Gray said 483 students from five secondary schools in the Canterbury region had entered the NCEA Level 1 English Digital Pilot examination which took place on Monday morning.

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One of those five schools was from the Timaru District and 13 students were entered by that school, she said.

Roncalli College student Reagan Ashley, 16, said he preferred typing up the answers to his English exam over writing them by hand.

"I think I just liked it better than writing on paper I suppose, just so much easier and I've also grown up around that sort of generation," Ashley said.

The programme was pretty easy to work with, and it would "definitely" work well for subjects such as English, history or business which involved a lot of writing, he said.

"For the second set of practise exams we did, we did most of them online. The likes of science, it was quite good but it was hard with the likes of science and math because they have a lot formulas and stuff like you have to write down.

"There would have to be a lot of customisations."

Roncalli College principal Chris Comeau said the school allowed the students to elect whether they would like to sit the exam online.

"The students who opted for the digital exam enjoyed the experience. The student I spoke with said it went quite smoothly and would opt to do more digital exams in the future," Comeau

Gray said involvement in the Digital Pilot examinations was voluntary and schools chose to participate and give students of the selected subjects the option of sitting a digital examination rather than the paper examination.

The printed examination paper was available as a back-up, she said.

Opihi College deputy principal Logan Callow said there had been some digital trials run within some departments at the school, but none of the school's students were using the digital option for their exams.

"A couple of different reasons, one, we need supportive infrastructure behind us, and two, we haven't had a lot of training with it with our staff yet, which I'm sure we'll do," he said.

"We'll probably look into it for next year a bit more seriously to try and make it happen."