Next week a new form of matric exam commences – and tensions among learners, teachers and parents were heightened by recent blunders around trial maths papers. This has left many wondering whether the department of education will deliver a credible final exam. Penny Vinjevold, deputy director general for further education and training, set out to put the Teacher’s mind at rest.
This marks the first year in which grade 12 learners will sit for the national senior certificate examinations since the introduction of the new curriculum. How ready are you for this challenge?
Administratively, we have been preparing for these exams since 2005. We appointed (exam) panels and so, since 2006, we have been training our exam panels who set grades 10, 11 and 12 papers. At the beginning of 2008 grade 12 exemplar papers were released to schools. We have already recruited 35 000 markers and started training them, with invigilators. We recruited senior markers with lots of experience. Our exam capturing system and back-up systems are ready to release the results at the end of December.
The national department of education has made exemplar exam papers available to all learners. But the similarities between the exemplar and trial papers amount to what has been called ”coaching” or ”rigging”.
No. Good examinations and good assessment practices throughout the world are not about putting obstacles in front of the children. What a good exam does is test how much children know. We wanted to give our learners the format so that they don’t get surprised or get nervous during the exams. We also made sure there are sets of questions that are problem-solving; questions that have high cognitive demand. So we don’t see this as coaching at all.
There are concerns that the exam timetable provides too little time between papers.
In the past exams ran over five weeks and we lost the whole of October for teaching. We got complaints that the learners were often at home for five days between one exam and the next and in fact that this is much worse for the learners.
Life orientation will not be externally examined, yet this subject can make a learner pass or fail. Can the department and quality watchdog body Umalusi give guarantees that there will be a uniform standard in this subject across all the provinces and schools?
It was never an external examination subject. It has always been an internally examined subject. But our strong provincial and national moderation team will look at the quality of the tasks that the learners have done during the year. Our moderators would make sure the quality of the internal assessment is of an acceptable standard.
There are reports that in the Northern Cape only 42 schools were selected to sit for the trial exams and this created anxiety among learners who did not take part in the exercise. Why was this so?
These schools each obtained an under-60% pass rate in 2007, so they had to take part in the compulsory trial exams. We have to protect the children. But we didn’t want to impose it on schools that have already set their own exams and who have been getting 80%-90% pass rates.
There is now no standard grade and higher grade differentiation, which was meant to accommodate learners of different abilities. How will they now be catered for?
We have asked our examiners to make sure that 30% of questions are standard grade level. So no learner should fail this year if he or she would have passed last year. Then the level goes up quite steeply to 50%, which is higher grade. We ensured that in every question paper there are difficult questions right up to 80%-90% level just to make sure there is differentiation.
Finally, in light of the recent mistakes involving the trial maths papers, for which you apologised, what assurance can you give to learners, teachers and parents who might still be harbouring doubts about the integrity and credibility of the forthcoming national exams?
Those exams were not set by the department’s national panel and were not internally and externally moderated. The only thing that went wrong was that the memorandum was not checked. We got out the correct memorandum within 48 hours. I want to reassure people that the department has checked, re-checked and double-checked the papers and memorandums.