The Weekly Mail this week visited Department of Education and Training marking centres in Pretoria and found major irregularities in the way black matric exam scripts are dealt with. This supports a long-standing belief that black matric results are inaccurate, a complaint that has been made by students for a number of years.
I visited marking centres at the Transvaal College of Education (TCE), Central Secondary School, the Pretoria Showgrounds Hall and the Technikon of the Northern Trans¬vaal (TNT), all in Soshanguve, Pretoria. DET exam scripts from all over the country are sent to these centres and two others in Pretoria for marking. I found no security in the marking rooms. I, and for that matter any student, could walk in, talk to the markers and handle scripts.
The DET has hired some of the matric students whose papers are being marked to distribute scripts among the markers and calculate results. University students are used to mark papers. The markers are working at the centres for over 12 hours a day and are then taking home hundreds of scripts – without any supervision. Some teachers go home at 9pm with up to 250 scripts and bring them back at 7am in the morning all marked with no checking of how they are managing to do so much work overnight. Money is also part of the game. Since they are paid R3,65 a script and there is no supervision of how much time they spend on each paper, the markers are trying to get through as many papers as they can.
The DET said yesterday that a total of about 5 000 000 scripts were marked by 7 450 examiners and sub-examiners. This means that, on average, each person would have to mark 671 scripts, or 51 a day if they are to meet their 13-day deadline. For those who work 12 hours a day, this gives them about 14 minutes per paper. For those who work only eight hours a day, they have an average of 9,5 minutes per paper. At TCE, African language papers, except Venda, are marked from 7am to 9pm with a one-hour break for lunch and supper. English, Biblical Studies, Physical Science, mathematics and history papers are marked at TNT.
The huge Pretoria showgrounds hall is also used for marking English papers 1 and 3. Examiners are accommodated at students’ dormatories. They have to be up at 5am to be ready for breakfast which is served from 6am to 7am. Between lunch and supper there is a 15-minute tea break at 10am and 4am. Lunch and supper hours are charac¬terised by long queues for food. ”We come from the examination rooms tired and have to queue for a long time before we can get food. This does not give us enough time to rest during the breaks,” said one teacher. Scores of examiners are packed into tiny classrooms and laboriously go through mountains of scripts in the hot Pretoria summer day. Short pants, open-neck T-shirts, littered bottles of cool drinks and cigarette stumps are evidence of their desperate attempts to concentrate in the heat. ”Essay-type questions are the most difficult because you have to concentrate, analyse and give the appropriate marks for that student. But at the same time I have to mark at least 60 papers a day to make good money,” said one teacher. It is evident that many of the markers are simply skimming the scripts.
White students from the universities of the Witwatersrand, Stellenbosch and Pretoria are also marking, sometimes judging scripts in subjects they are not themselves studying. For example, a student in town planning at Wits University is one of the markers at TCE’s room C205 where South Sotho paper 1 and 3 are marked. Matric pupils and student teachers are used every year by the DET to calculate and enter marks onto mark sheets. Seventeen-year-old Nomi Machebe, a standard 10 pupil at Nkunkua, Ganzankulu is one of the many students used at TCE to calculate examination marks. The dispatch room at TCE, where vernacular examination papers are kept and distributed to different marking rooms, is manned by students.
Teachers who are marking history papers are frustrated because there are deficiencies in the memorandum given to them to guide them in their marking. For example, question one and two of the examination paper which deals with Josef Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt, makes no mention of some of the most important facts. Said one teacher: ”I have to refer to the text book because the memorandum does not reflect Stalin’s five-year-plan or Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ which form an important aspect of their lives. ”A negligent examiner will just ig¬nore these important facts because they are not reflected in the memorandum,” he said. ”You can therefore imagine how many other papers have such flaws which have an adverse effect on a particular student’s performance.”
White students who mark English papers at the Pretoria show grounds also take scripts home. ”These guys (students) take about five batches of scripts home and hand them in the following morning, marked and completed,” said one examiner at the showgrounds. Each batch has about 45 to 50 scripts. ”How is it possible to complete four or five batches of scripts in one night, considering that language papers have essays and letters,” he asked. Some of the white examiners, including the students, are accommodated at the Manhattan Hotel in Pretoria and this is where late-night marking is taking place.
After 9pm, when the tired teachers at the TCE marking centre put their pens away, many of them make a bee-line to the White House, a cosy shebeen just opposite the centre. ”Brother, we just have to come here to cool off our heads after doing this big job,” one of the teachers said to me. After the shebeen rounds, which sometimes go up to 11pm, examiners go to their rooms and sleep for about three hours and then start marking the scripts they have taken home up to 4am. The examiner would then sleep for an hour and be up from bed a1 5am to be ready for breakfast. ”I take a short rest and wake at about 2am and then push the stuff. It is not much of a problem because l use a computer,” said one teacher. A computer is a word used by examiners to mean they run over scripts without checking them thoroughly.
Many teachers who arrived at the centres this week seeking jobs were turned away as ”all the posts had been filled”. Some teachers, who had travelled from as far as the Transkei, were loitering at the TCE campus hoping to get jobs. Teachers who could not get jobs claimed that there is favouritism by senior officials responsible for appointments. ”Why do they use students when we are available,” remarked one of the teachers. Students used in calculating examination marks and manning the case patch room are called administrative aids. Inspector of schools, school princi¬pals, university lecturers and others who do not teach the subjects, are also examiners. ”The whole business is to make money,” said one teacher.
Academics have criticised the way DET matric exams are marked. A respected educationist and former Wits mathematics lecturer, TW Kambule, said the whole system proves that matric results are a sham. ”I suppose it explains so much when the results are published,” said Kambule. ”I have heard of these irregularities before but the department officials are very impervious to reasoning because they think they know everything. ”The fact that unqualified markers are used show their reasoning that there is not much that black students know,” he said. He said students are disgruntled because they know that at the end of the year ”things won’t be handled properly”.
The general secretary of the African Teachers Association of South Africa (Atasa), HH Dlamlenze said it was totally wrong to use students to mark scripts. ”The scripts should marked by people who teach those subjects,” said Dlamlenze. He said it is also not proper for examiners to take scripts home. ”Anything can happen when scripts are taken home. Friends and relatives, who are not suitably qualified can be used to mark scripts. – Philip Molefe
This article originally appeared in the Weekly Mail.
