The department of education has had to act swiftly to correct a potentially costly blunder after schools were sent error-riddled question papers for this year’s grade 12 preliminary examinations as well as faulty marking guideline memoranda.
Some of the recipients claim the errors in the question papers would have made it difficult for learners to work out the correct answers.
The errors, which affected the mathematics and mathematical literacy papers, have caused jitters within the educational fraternity and have left a question mark over the credibility and integrity of the forthcoming matric examinations.
The timetable for writing the prelims has also been a source of concern. A worried parent, who is a member of a school governing body and did not wish to be identified, shared her misgivings with the Teacher. Although the papers were set nationally, she said, there was no common national timetable, with the result that learners in various provinces wrote the same paper on different days, allowing learners who wrote the examination earlier to alert friends in other provinces about the contents of the papers. In some instances, she said, papers were posted on the internet.
“Obviously learners who have the benefit of this information are able to perform better, but this will not be a fair reflection of their actual abilities and sets them up for failure when they write the final examinations.
“What concerns me most,” she said, “is that universities use these results as admission criteria and companies that offer bursaries also use these marks to evaluate candidates.”
This year’s trial examinations are particularly significant because they will serve as a “dry run” for the grade 12s, who will be sitting the first examinations since the implementation of the revised curriculum.
In a written response to queries about the system the department’s chief director of national examinations, assessment and measurement, Nkosinathi Sishi, assured learners and teachers that the department has the situation under control.
The department “accepts full responsibility for the error and guarantees that no learner will be disadvantaged by the omission,” Sishi wrote. The trial examinations were not quality assured by Umalusi, the statutory organisation, which monitors and improves the quality of general and further education and training in South Africa; they were preparatory and intended to give candidates the opportunity to “obtain a practice session on a paper equivalent to the final paper”.
The concern about inaccurate memoranda and question papers surfaced after anomalies were picked up by members of the Suid Afrikanse Onderwysersunie (Saou), which reported it to its union’s curriculum services division.
According to the union one memorandum concerning the mathematics paper contained “unacceptable mistakes, with wrong principles and methods used”, while the mathematical literacy paper was “unacceptably easy – even if the second paper (was) expected to be more difficult”.
The union noted that there was a “high similarity between the question papers set and the exemplars of papers which were made available by the national department”. This would result in “examination coaching, high marks and false perceptions about learners’ understanding of the subject matter”.
Sue Muller, National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of South Africa (Naptosa)’s curriculum expert, said it is not uncommon for this kind of mistake to creep in. She surmised, based on her experience, that what had probably happened was that examiners failed to effect changes, for instance, ensuring that the mathematical principles and methods used were correct. Internal moderators, whose task it is to identify such faults, should have picked them up, said Muller.
“The error is certainly not something that can be made deliberately, nor does it reflect incompetence on the part of officials involved. It is just that people [at this level] tend to focus on setting the paper and in the process forget to correct or insert suggested changes or comments,” she said.
Muller said the danger with this kind of mistake is that teachers who lack experience and have limited knowledge of a subject rely heavily on the marking guidelines and may mark incorrectly.
Only teachers with experience would be able to pick up errors, she said.
Sishi’s explanation of how the problem came about backed up Muller’s views. Corrections had been made to the question paper during the setting and review process, he wrote, “and these changes were not reflected in the memorandums, hence teachers were provided with an incorrect marking guideline”. With regard to mathematical literacy paper one, which most teachers described as “unacceptably easy”, Sishi wrote that the paper was deliberately set to “be of a lower cognitive demand than paper two”.
“The distinction between paper one [mathematical literacy] and paper two [mathematics] is that 60% of paper one is based on ‘one-step questions’ requiring recall. Paper two is pegged at a higher cognitive level, targeting skills relating to application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation and does not include any recall questions.
“Therefore, it is incorrect to state that the mathematical literacy paper was ‘unacceptably easy’ but rather it was of a lower level of difficulty as intended in the subject assessment guideline,” he wrote.
In the meantime, with the final examination only a few weeks away, teachers have decided the best way to prepare is to stick to the exemplar papers that were distributed by the department earlier in the year. These have been drafted to ensure teachers know what standard to expect of the questions.