Media fuss about admission tests for universities is unfounded, as the minister of education and the universities are not in disagreement on the matter, the ministry said on Monday.
”It is highly regrettable that certain political parties have chosen to exploit the matter for petty point-scoring and to plant confusion in the minds of students and their parents,” said ministry spokesperson Rob Turrell.
He was referring to a statement by the Democratic Alliance that the ministry should not seek to determine how tertiary institutions select their students.
DA education spokesperson Helen Zille said on Sunday that if the matric exams do not provide a good indication of which students will succeed in higher education, then the universities should have the autonomy to provide their own tests.
On Monday, Turrell asserted that the ministry has not even been in discussion with the South African Universities Vice-Chancellors’ Association (Sauvca) on the matter, let alone disagreed with it, and Sauvca issued a similar statement last week.
Turrell warned that this sort of media speculation might harm the ”excellent relationship” the higher-education sector has with the ministry.
Universities are not developing tests to replace the Senior Certificate (or its successor, the FETC), Turrell said.
He said the tests under discussion will be used by universities to place students in different academic programmes, and the Senior Certificate will remain the minimum requirement for entry into higher education.
The statement by Sauvca was similar, emphasising that the main benefit of the sets will be to provide a national benchmark to establish mathematical and literacy competencies.
It should ”augment and not replace the Senior Certificate and the FETC”, Sauvca chief executive Piyushi Kotecha said last Thursday.
News of the national benchmark tests was greeted with much speculation about the inadequacies of the current matric exams for selecting students who will achieve at university.
Some educators are worried that universities have become flooded in recent years with students who clog up the system, because they do not have the capacity to pass. — Sapa