More than 200 schools in Limpopo saw their dismal 17% pass rate in the preliminary matric examination last year surge to 73% in the final exam. This increase remains unexplained, and adds to existing controversy around the 2003 matric results.
The Mopani district in the Limpopo province, consisting of 211 schools, saw its pass rate surge by 56% between the preliminary exam last July and the final exam written less than six months later in November, according to statistical data seen by the Mail & Guardian.
Three independent and prominent educationists who have assessed this data say that it raises serious questions about the reliability of the matric assessment procedures.
“This data shows vast and shocking discrepancies in the matric examinations,” said Jonathan Jansen, the dean of education at the University of Pretoria. “This simply deepens the reservations and suspicions that the public, educationists and academics have about the validity of the senior certificate to begin with.”
A professor of statistics at the University of Pretoria who analysed the data, but who wished to remain anonymous said that these statistics “are a horrendous time bomb”.
Helen Perry, an education research associate at Wits University, said that this data requires a “research project to get to the bottom of the statistical discrepancy”. But the data “doesn’t engender a huge amount of confidence in how the schools managed this miraculous turn around”.
The Department of Education said it is aware of this “phenomenon” (the leap in passes between the preliminary and the final exams marks in the Mopani district). But “the integrity of the 2003 Senior Certificate results is beyond question, and no amount of scratching and digging will change that fact”, said the acting chief director of national examinations and assessment, Nkosi Sishi, in response to questions the M&G sent to Minister of Education Kader Asmal.
” … We believe that we can only fully understand [the phenomenon] through rigorous research. Such research would have, inter alia, to answer the following questions: to what extent are the preparatory and senior certificate examinations comparable? What accounts for students’ differential performances in the preparatory and Senior Certificate results,” said Sishi.
Since Asmal announced the results in December, when he highlighted especially an overall increase in passes from 69% in 2002 to 73% last year, scepticism has gathered steam, with a spectrum of observers from academic specialists to parents and pupils questioning the quality of a matric pass and the means used to achieve yet another increase in the pass rate.
Commentators have drawn attention to questionable practices such as preventing weaker pupils from entering the matric year, and forcing candidates to write on standard grade.
In the Limpopo case, the education department said comparing the overall pass rate of the preparatory examination with that of the final examination is like “comparing apples and oranges”, because the preparatory exams do not include the students’ “continuous assessment performance throughout the year”; at the time that the preparatory exam is written “many of the schools have not completed the syllabus”; and “provinces only set a small sample of the papers for their preparatory examinations.
Examination papers for only 13 subjects were set by the province, and the rest by individual districts, the departent said. There is therefore minimal provincial standardisation for the preliminary exams.
But, said Jansen, “The sheer scale of the difference here, even with the variations between the management and the content of the two sets of exams, shows that there is something fundamentally wrong. There is just no way that you can explain this huge difference.”
Perry said, “I am confident that the quality of the exam papers is fairly high and that Umalusi [the independent quality assurer that assessed the matriculation exam procedure] is as thorough as it can be, but this situation begs the question: Are we not placing too much emphasis on the pass versus fail notion in matric? In reality the assessment criterion is relatively arbitrary and the future of matriculants should not rest on a single set of exams. It would probably be better to scrap the pass versus fail barrier and simply send students out with their results.”
According to Jansen, this set of data may be a microcosm of a national trend. “My feeling is that even though this came out in Mopani district the scale of the problem warrants an examination of the whole country. I think this is more systemic than simply an isolated incident.
“What really pisses me off is once again the government’s attention is drawn to data that is serious enough to raise some fundamental questions about the validity of the matric exams. The whole point is that rather than become defensive about the situation the government should admit that this is severe enough to require a commission of enquiry.”