CLAIRE BISSEKER: Misleading matriculants about their competence is short-sighted

On hearing basic education minister Angie Motshekga’s triumph in heralding the 2022 matric results, one might be led to believe that SA had, through sheer grit and determination, managed to defy grave Covid-19-related learning losses to post record-breaking matric results.

There was a lot of nonsense in her speech about the “resilience” of the Class of 2022 and “the maturity of a system on the rise”, as if this could explain a 44% increase in the number of matric candidates writing the National Senior Certificate since 2019, a 41.6% increase in the number of basic passes and a 50% increase in the number of bachelor passes. The bachelor pass rate (38.4% of all matrics) was also the highest ever, after having hovered around 36% for the last three years.

If the department had put in place a significant recovery programme to claw back the eight months of teaching lost to the pandemic these stellar results would be more credible, but its efforts have been limited. As such, we should take the results with a heavy pinch of salt.

This is exactly what SA’s leading educational researchers and economists urge us to do. In a recent paper, Servaas van der Berg of Stellenbosch University, et al, provide evidence of the dire effect of Covid-19 on schooling and argue that SA’s record-beating matric results should not be taken as evidence to the contrary.

Even Motshekga does not try to play these learning losses down, saying “the devastating effects” of the pandemic on schooling “continue to be a cause for great concern” and that she fully expects these effects to interrupt SA’s upward trajectory in international benchmark tests.

But how can the government celebrate record matric results as evidence of an improving education system while still fearing that the effects of Covid-10 learning losses will show up when we are compared to other countries? Surely this is contradictory?

The logical conclusion is that greater leniency was shown in advancing weak candidates to grade 12 (hence the 220,000 increase in matric enrolments in 2022 compared to 2019), and when adjusting the 2022 cohort’s matric exam marks (hence the 92,700 increase in bachelor’s passes over the same period).

As to whether the system is really improving, it is necessary to consider SA’s maths and physical science marks — something Motshekga failed to even mention in her speech.

Perhaps this is because the maths pass rate fell from 57.6% in 2021 to 55% last year. In 2022 just 20% of the entire matric cohort (just over 148,000 candidates out of around 725,000) wrote and passed maths — no better in percentage terms than in 2009.

Though the physical science pass rate improved from 69% to 74.6% last year, still only 21.4% of the matric cohort wrote and passed the subject. What a travesty that in more than a decade SA has not been able to channel more than one in five matrics towards passing these key gateway subjects.

Even more alarming is that in 2022 less than 5% of the matric cohort passed either maths or physical science with a mark of 60% or more — a realistic requirement for tertiary study in subjects such as engineering and accountancy. This is bad news for an economy that suffers from a shortage of engineers, scientists and accountants.

So despite Motshekga’s gushing, and the record number of bachelor passes, we are clearly not seeing the kind of improvement in the quality of the education system that is needed to underpin economic and productivity growth.

Misleading the public and raising false expectations among pupils as to their competence is short-sighted and deeply unfair — not only to them but also to the universities, which now face nearly 100,000 more pupils than usual demanding entry with newly minted bachelor passes but without necessarily having the academic ability to cope at tertiary level.

Every year the same matric charade plays out. We need to stop kidding ourselves or it will all end in tears.

• Bisseker is a Financial Mail assistant editor.