The pass percentage for inmates writing the grade 12 (NSC) exam was 86.3%, but only 76.2% for those in regular school. You are, therefore, more likely to get a good pass in prison than in school. Parents should weigh these options when making decisions about where to enrol their children.
You do not need a degree in numbers to recognise the nonsense logic in those statements. Yet when you have large amounts of data at your disposal, you can make any number of seemingly authoritative claims to bamboozle the public. This is exactly what the minister of basic education and her DG, Mathanzima Mweli, did again this week, except there is a tragic backdrop to the annual deception — a pandemic that has claimed more than 49,000 souls of which upwards of 2,000 were staff who worked at schools.
It could have been worse, minister Angie Motshekga exclaimed about the drop of 5.1% in the “matric” pass rate: “I was expecting a bloodbath.” There must be a term in psychology for this sleight of hand: accept the bad news because if it were not for me, you would be in even bigger trouble. Well, there is every indication that there was a bloodbath up and down the school system. So let’s take a closer look, but let me first say the obvious.
I am delighted that 440,702 pupils passed in a pandemic year that cost them almost three months of in-school instruction. Apart from the academic costs, the social, emotional and mental health costs of the lockdown exacted an as yet unseen toll on schoolchildren. To emerge with a pass under these conditions really merits a “well done” to all our young people.
Now for the hard questions. Do these results reflect the actual academic outcomes of hardworking pupils? What the public does not see is the real struggle behind the scenes between the technical experts of Umalusi’s Assessment and Standards Committee and the political hacks. The committee tries to play with a straight bat, as one of them explained: “Purpose of standardisation is not to deal generally with factors which create unfair conditions to cohorts that sit for the exams from year to year.” Rather, its role is to adjudicate the difficulty of exam papers and make adjustments (too difficult or too easy) based on average marks in those papers over the preceding five-year period. Even then, the adjusted marks are made within strict parameters.
The political operators, on the other hand, could not care less about standards. As one committee member put it: “The DG was incredibly involved [and] furious. We did not adjust upwards the subjects he wanted and called us harsh, rigid, inflexible.” Wow. Why on Earth is the department’s most senior bureaucrat trying to exert irregular influence on the assessment experts? If true, this is scandalous.
Among assessment experts in the know, political pressure is only one part of the story. There is suspicion of widespread “group copying” at some sites; the possibility of “sympathetic marking”; that SBAs (school-based assessments) were reduced and the tasks made more lenient to adjust for a taxing year; and that some subjects have become so much easier every year, especially history, which is also the subject of speculation that it might be made compulsory. If even half of these concerns are true, then the real scale of the bloodbath might be worse than we think.
What is the real takeaway from the minister’s announcement of the NSC results? It is this: that the underlying problems of dysfunctionality have not disappeared behind the facade of official theatrics. Listen to this: only 35.6% of those who wrote mathematics passed at the 40% level — and that’s for 24,726 fewer pupils who wrote the subject in 2019. That pass percentage is persistently low also for physical science (42.4%), economics (42.2%), geography (46.2%) and the life sciences (47.9%). You can imagine that if a university pass level was applied (50%), those numbers would fall even more precariously. At the 30% pass level, however, 92.1% of students passed history, second only to life orientation (99.4%), where you can get a fantastic mark just for showing signs of breathing.
In the end, it is the quality of the passes that matter and here the Western Cape easily outpaces the other eight provinces, using the number of distinctions as a benchmark. In this province 7.10% of its candidates achieved distinctions, with the nearest rival being Gauteng (5.20%), and the number one province on passes alone, the Free State, standing at a mere 3.60%. As I still tell Grade 12 classes in mass assemblies, these days, passing alone means nothing; passing well enough is the difference between a good life and one of perpetual struggle.
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