The familiar postmortem on the annual matric results numbers settles yet again on the quality of the National Senior Certificate versus the pass rate. At face value all is looking rosy.
The national pass rate is up to 72.5%, almost two percentage points up on the year before, and an outlier province like the Free State came storming home with 88.2%.
But the truth lies elsewhere.
As Jonathan Jansen, the academic and former vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State, argued in The Times yesterday, passing matric is no great shakes.
"Remember," he wrote, "the exams are rigged to make the weakest pupils pass, not to make the brightest pupils excel ..."
It's an uncomfortable observation, but evidence to support his argument shines bright in Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga's results speech.
In it she deals in some detail with the phenomenon of "progressed" pupils.
So, what is this cohort that the minister focused on? They are pupils who have repeated Grade 11 more than once or who are over-aged.
This is a veritable army in our education system, numbering 108742 in the Class of 2016. Of that number, 67510 sat the matric exams, or 16% of all of those registered to write.
Around 43% of progressed pupils who wrote matric passed the exam, giving cause for Motshekga to celebrate how the system had turned tens of thousands from becoming high school drop-outs to candidates for tertiary education.
That's one way of looking at it, or you can look at it as Jansen does: that the system has been massaged to help the weakest.
It stretches the bounds of credulity to accept that tens of thousands of pupils who had repeatedly failed the prior grade were able to pass matric in one year.
Without rose-tinted glasses the real matric story is bleak.
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