Exam Overview
What Performance Standard 93303 is, how the examination works, and what that means for your preparation.
Check the current NZQA assessment specifications each year before finalising exam advice. Details such as session length, number of questions, resource material, and submission format can change. Re-summarise the "assessment specifications" section below each year once NZQA publishes the new specifications (currently reflects 2026).
Performance Standard 93303
New Zealand Scholarship Media Studies is assessed against Performance Standard 93303. The outcome it describes is using knowledge of media studies to critically analyse media texts and contexts — where "contexts" explicitly means the social, cultural, technological, industrial, economic, and political circumstances in which texts are produced, circulated, and read.
Unlike achievement standards, a performance standard has no Achieved/Merit/Excellence criteria. Your whole performance is judged against the Scholarship descriptor, which (in summary) rewards high-level analysis and critical thinking; integration, synthesis, and application of well-developed knowledge to complex situations; and logical development, precision, and clarity of ideas.
Outstanding Scholarship additionally requires these qualities in a sustained way, plus perception and insight, sophisticated integration and abstraction, independent reflection and extrapolation, and convincing communication. Notice the recurring theme: not more knowledge, but more thinking with knowledge — exactly what this site trains.
The examination
The exam format has been stable in recent years (2023–2026). In summary:
- An end-of-year examination, sat in the NZQA Scholarship examination period — three hours, total score 24, online or on paper.
- You answer all three questions, each as an extended essay.
- Each question gives you a choice of quotations or statements (usually four). You choose ONE and build your essay in response to it — agreeing, disagreeing, or weighing multiple points of view.
- The three questions have fixed territories:
- Question One — media and wider society: analyse the development of a medium / media industry and the factors that shape it.
- Question Two — media production: demonstrate critical understanding of one medium and its production context, including reference to your own production experience.
- Question Three — close reading of media texts: analyse media texts (from any medium) that you have read closely — genre, readings, representation.
- You may not use the same material for more than one question. This single rule shapes your whole preparation: you need distinct evidence banks for industry, production, and close reading.
- Every question expects a wide range of specific evidence — there is no set text list. Your studied work, independent viewing and reading, and your own production experience are all legitimate material.
- In each question you must show critical understanding of at least one medium or media industry and its context, illustrated by specific media texts and other relevant evidence.
Pre-prepared answers. Your response must answer the specific question asked. Reproducing prepared material — however accurate or eloquent — does not meet the standard. Examiners are explicitly looking for the ability to adapt knowledge to an unfamiliar question. Plan for flexibility, not scripts.
2026 assessment specifications (summary)
The 2026 specifications (published March 2026) confirm the established format: an end-of-year examination, online or on printed paper, with essay answers to three questions — Question One on media and society (industry, developments), Question Two on your own media production experience, and Question Three on reading media texts (genre, readings, representation). Each question asks you to address a selected quotation, statement, or discussion question, and you may not use the same material in more than one answer.
The full specification, the performance standard, and three years of past papers, schedules, reports, and exemplars are linked from the Resources page archive.
What the format means for your preparation
- Prepare three distinct evidence banks. Because material cannot be reused across questions, you need: a studied media industry with its developments and pressures (Q1); your own production experience, critically reflected on (Q2); and a connected set of closely read texts (Q3). Plan which examples belong to which question before the exam, with reserves.
- Practise the quotation move. Every question begins with choosing one quotation from four. The skill is unpacking the quotation's claim, taking a position on it, and addressing all of its parts — examiners repeatedly note that answering only half the quotation caps a response. The Essay Guide trains exactly this.
- Train for sustained writing. Three full essays in three hours is a physical and mental skill. Roughly an hour per essay, including unpacking and planning time. Practise full papers under exam conditions with the timed Exam Simulator, and pace yourself with the Study Plan.
- Prepare material, not essays. Examiners explicitly identify and penalise pre-prepared responses — including ones recycled from previous years' quotations. Build a flexible bank of concepts (Big Concepts), theory (Theory Toolkit), and examples (Example Bank) you can recombine.
- Read the past papers and reports. Three years of real papers, assessment schedules, examiner reports, and graded exemplars are in this site's archive — the closest thing to inside information that exists. The consistent messages are summarised on the Examiners page, and the Worked Examples page walks through the 2025 paper question by question, including how answers are scored.