Gauteng throws its investigation nets wider after shocking revelations from matric cheats, reports Andy Duffy
Confessions from Gauteng’s matric cheats this week have prompted the province to widen its investigation to include the elite academics who drew up the exam papers.
Gauteng Education MEC Mary Metcalfe told the Mail & Guardian that statements from several accused pupils suggest examiners in at least two subjects could be implicated in the cheating.
The province’s examiners are drawn from its top state and independent schools, and universities. So far 28 of the 1 413 matric candidates under investigation for alleged irregularities have appeared before the two panels (one in Johannesburg and one in Pretoria) probing the accusations – 15 of these have confessed.
Metcalfe says the links to examiners were an “unanticipated but not entirely unexpected” outcome of the hearings.
“For years people working within white education have known of a culture of hints and this is what we are uncovering. It is being investigated for the first time,” she says.
“This is the worst symptom of that culture, and the motive is symptomatic of the moral decay that exists where schools are driven by the glory of pass rates.”
Eyebrows have also been raised within teaching circles about similarities between the matric papers and mock exams students took just weeks before at several top performing schools.
Metcalfe says she has no evidence so far to support such suspicions, but the investigation will widen as further cases are uncovered.
She adds that the provincial education department remains confident of the integrity of its examiners. “There is an acknowledgment that to be appointed as an examiner is a professional honour,” she says. “They are expected to abide by a professional code of conduct.”
Police are already investigating the theft of exam papers – three people have been arrested. Metcalfe says any examiner found to have passed on matric information prior to the exams will be professionally censured – and probably banned from future involvement.
This week’s hearings are the first time the cheating has been clearly linked to the top echelons of the academic world, completing a chain of corruption that rings the province’s education system.
Alongside the pupils, teachers and principals have been accused, invigilators have been fingered and employees of the education department have also been drawn into the net. Metcalfe says, however, that no senior department officials have been implicated.
The leak of exam papers amounted more to petty pilfering than a grand conspiracy, she adds. The majority of cheating cases involved pupils smuggling notes into the exam hall.
Independent school Crawford College denied this week that there was any link between its staff’s involvement in the matric process and the performance of its Johannesburg and Pretoria campuses – the first-best and second-best performers in the province.
Director Graeme Crawford says 10 staff members were invited to take part in the 1996 matric – including examiners, markers and moderators.
But he adds that the school had also led the province in 1995, when its staff were not involved in the matric set-up.
He attributes the performance to the schools’ mode of teaching, which he says encourages pupils to think for themselves rather than to memorise facts long enough to reproduce them on exam day.