Virtually all US universities accept NCEA qualifications and top academic institutions like Stanford and Harvard are very familiar with them to the point they have regional admission officers. They are often familiar with NZQA Scholarship as well.

Recently, I was at a conference for internarional school counsellors which had a number of admissions deans from top universities and one of the case examples in the transcript best practice section was literally an NCEA transcript.

Important other academic material for NCEA students is information on class rank I.e. How do you compare to your cohort of students at your school as well as standardized test scores (SAT/ACT) are also important.

UK universities in recent years have become much more accepting of NCEA and now many universities list general admissions criteria for NCEA students.

It was not always like this. There was a well known case in 2011 where the highest achieving NCEA student in the country with 6+ outstanding scholarships wasn’t offered an interview at Cambridge. This was problematic because it illustrated that NCEA carried little weight in UK admissions. However, in recent years awareness for NCEA has shot up.

I would lastly add that in general IB or CIE provides a stronger foundation for international study and is regarded as being more rigorous so if you are evaluating high schools with the intention to go overseas, you may want to look at these curriculum. NCEA, however, still provides a solid foundation especially if you take NZQA scholarship.

At Crimson, every year we help many students gaining admission into both the US and UK across a wide range of institutions from an NCEA background. Good luck!