Professor John Volmink, the head of the council of standards body Umalusi has stated that the matric pass rate is set to drop for the first time in five years as he expects the pass rate to drop between 3% and 5%.
Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga will host a briefing tomorrow, at which she’ll announce the overall pass rate for the matric class of 2014.
Even though the national pass rate has climbed steadily from 60.6% in 2009, soaring from 73.9% in 2012 to an all-time post-1994 high of 78.2% last year. Volmink believes we’ll see a dip instead of breaking the 80% barrier in 2014.
Volmink attributed his predicted dip to:
- A failure rate of 48% (without adjustments) in maths literacy, compared with 20% in 2013
- A drop of between 5% and 6% in the pass rate for mathematics and physical science
- Drop in home language pass rates, including English.
With regards to the Matric cheating scandal, Umalusi has said cheating in last year’s matric exams took place across seven of the country’s nine provinces – with KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape being the worst of the two.
So far 58 of 117 centres audited in KZN and the Eastern Cape were found guilty of cheating along with six centres in Gauteng, one in the Northern Cape, one in North West, two in Mpumalanga and one in the Western Cape.
The newspaper has named the schools and reported that one of the worst offenders was Mpikayizekanye Secondary in Tugela Ferry, KZN, where Umalusi’s external moderators allegedly found evidence of possible assistance by an invigilator in the maths paper.
Another example of cheating was that of 40 candidates at another school all having the same answers “word for word”.
On Tuesday, results will be published in newspapers, classified according to examination numbers and not names. The department however urges candidates to obtain their results at the school or exam centre where they wrote their examination.
Teachers would be at the schools on Tuesday to answer queries and provide advice and support.
- A total of 688 660 candidates were registered to write the year-end examination. Of this number, 550 127 were full time students.
- Kwazulu-Natal had the largest group of full time candidates and Gauteng had the lowest.
- Girls dominated the cohort of 2014 candidates, making up 54.6% of the matric group.
- Examinations were written across 6740 locations with 65 000 invigilators overseeing the five-week writing period.
- A total of 41 000 markers at 118 marking venues then tackled the assessment of the examination papers produced.
