How should we think about the 2006 matric results?

Schooling is a very complex enterprise which can’t be measured adequately by means of one indicator, and any attempt to do so inevitably leads to distortions. This has been the case with the national obsession with the pass rate in the annual Senior Certificate exam. The pass rate is purely a measure of efficiency (percentage of passes compared with number of candidates). To illustrate the point: in 2006 more candidates wrote the exam and more passed, and yet much fuss is made about the pass rate declining marginally (see table below). Surely this is misguided: more young citizens were given the opportunity to write and more are now entering the labour market with at least a minimum qualification. And yet we make a fuss that this was achieved with marginally less efficiency than in 2005. For my money I would rather have greater numbers passing, particularly if those passes are of higher quality, even if it does cost a little more per candidate.

Obviously it would be preferable to have the pass rate increasing, but the more important indicators are those which measure the quantity and quality of learning. Under South Africa’s present circumstances, where we provide school places to close to all children of primary school age and to high and increasing numbers of high school students, but where the quality of our schooling is very low by any comparative standard, the imperative is to improve quality. Yet quality is the hardest entity to measure and does not appear directly in the table of key statistics above. The quality of any exam paper is indicated by the level of cognitive demand of individual items and the range of such items. For example, research undertaken by Umalusi – the standards watchdog – in 2003 demonstrated that over the previous three or four years, in five key subjects (English Second / Additional Language, English First Language, Mathematics, History, and Biology), exam questions had become less varied, shorter and less demanding, at the expense of items which require higher levels of analysis and extended written argument. Against this background, the really big news of 2005 and 2006 is that Umalusi and the Department of Education have embarked on a concerted effort to improve the quality of the matric exam.

The third important indicator of the output of the school system is the quantity of passes. This is measured by the actual numbers of students obtaining a Senior Certificate, but more importantly, by the numbers of university exemptions and passes in HG mathematics. On their own, these numbers don’t say much and are only meaningful when read against a measure of quality. Now, as we have said, quality is measured by the professional judgment of subject experts and is hard to express in a number: we just have to take their word for it.

It goes without saying that it is very difficult to improve both quality and quantity at the same time. The expectation would be that if the exam papers get harder, and teachers are teaching to previous, easier standards, then numbers passing are likely to decline. This is exactly what happened in 2006. So, while absolute numbers passing did go up – and this is an important achievement – the numbers of quality passes (exemptions, HG maths) dropped. The prediction is that numbers are likely to increase once teachers begin to teach to the new standards established by the 2006 Senior Certificate. Thus, from 2007 we should come to expect increases in the numbers of quality passes. Indeed, government is attempting the stiff but critically important task of improving quality and quantity at the same time. In 2008 the new FET Certificate will take a further step in the direction of quality, while the Department of Education’s Dinaledi project is designed to double the numbers of maths and science passes by the following year.