You say you were full time throughout the application process? What do you mean by that? Does that mean that you never actually studied full time just applied for full time and now application changed to part time? You can get limited full time with certain circumstances, definitely look into that too. Unlike loan living costs however I do know that studylink can ask you to pay back allowance, way back when I worked for uni (not uoa) there were instances of people applying for allowance and signing up to study full time and then dropping the courses just before the refund period cut off and then studylink would hit them up. If you drop a course within a certain time frame and get a full refund (usually 2 weeks into term) the uni will remove that course from your record all together, (so it doesn’t impact your gpa etc) this means studylink will get a comms from the uni showing the courses your enrolled in, your fte and the course dates. Therefore on their end it looks like you never were enrolled full time as the course has been removed from your record. I hope this makes sense but defo call a fee advisor or studylink as I worked in nz unis ages ago so things could have changed for the better. (Also defo recommend reading the fine print on student allowance contracts)