Students are reacting unsympathetically to their peers, who struggled in their attempt to pass the NCEA level one maths exam this week.
Some Year 11s were left distraught by the questions, with reports of youths walking out of the test crying in frustration.
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However other students say NCEA pupils need to stop "whining and crying", and should have studied harder.
"Firstly, being a student in Year 11, who does Cambridge at school, I really feel that NCEA students need to stop whining and crying," one student who wished to remain anonymous, but provided his ID as proof he was a student, told Newshub.
"It's an exam and you can't predict or expect specific concepts to be in the exam, really you need be prepared to expect the unexpected."
He disagrees with fellow student Lavanya Gupta, who said the new style of questioning left her without options to study in previous papers and shocked by the difficulty of the questions.
"Remembering one of the questions, I later showed to my father who is an engineer, upon looking at the question my father was baffled. He knew how to answer, but using high level math that was not taught to us," she says.
But other students disagree.
"It's supposed to be abstract and foreign and realistically you can't ever expect specific things to be in exams," the anonymous student told Newshub.
"Exams are supposed to at least set us up for life, and over time we encounter many obstacles which we are not prepared for yet it's only up to us to overcome these particular obstacles, however hard they may be."
Many maths teachers have said the exam was "very unfair", and have criticised the exam-makers for putting year 12 work into a year 11 exam.
"There were definitely some questions in there that weren't at the correct curriculum level," Kapiti College head of maths Jake Wills told The AM Show on Wednesday.
"There were some who just came out in absolute tears because they were like 'I don't know how to do this'."
But some maths students disagree with the teacher, calling his complaints "completely absurd".
"This year's math paper was very good; it tested how students could apply their math knowledge through a variety of questions," another student told Newshub.
"A student in a Herald article says: 'The questions were extremely difficult, there were angles missing and they made all diagrams very complicated'. This argument is completely irrational and just shows that the student was unprepared, too overconfident, or expected a memory game instead of a real examination.
"I am just hating the fact that a difficult exam has got everyone in NZ 'crying' and complaining, probably because everyone was expecting an easy 1+1 examination."
Newshub.
