An NCEA exam that subjected Year 11 students to questions allegedly above their curriculum level has provided a welcome opportunity for smug adults to use the internet to demonstrate how much better they can perform tasks than a 15-year-old child.

Grown men and women across the country were thrilled to read this morning’s news that a large number of stupid and incompetent children had failed basic maths problems that weren’t half as hard as baby boomers had done when they were just toddlers.

“I’ve been working the same miserable desk job for 20 years,” said Hank Levick, a frequent commenter on internet news articles. “But you do that in hopes that one day, your moment will come, and today, it did.”

Levick said he immediately logged on to Stuff.co.nz to post comments about how easy he found the questions that were given to 15-year-olds, but that might’ve been more suitable for 16 or 17-year-olds.

“Pretty simple stuff,” he wrote. “I probably could’ve done this in first form, not sure what all the fuss is about.”

Other commenters aged 40 and over agreed, saying they had completed the test while at work in “less than five minutes,” and that parents and children today were “soft” and “coddled.”

53-year-old part-time nurse and Justice of the Peace Carol Baldwin said she couldn’t wait to get home and tell her husband about how she’d got every question on the test correct.

“I can do maths better than kids who are in some cases 14,” she boasted.

Prolific and well-respected Stuff commenter Robo2828 also seized on the opportunity to tell the country he had recently sat and passed a maths paper from Cambridge, which is a place for smart people in England.

Despite complaints, NZQA is saying there won’t be a resit for the test, noting that it was “developed by an experienced team with expert knowledge of mathematics assessment and reviewed by several current secondary school teachers,” all of whom found it “very easy.”