CAPE TOWN - The council for quality assurance in education, Umalusi, has cleared confusion around the approval of the 2021 National Senior Certificate (NSC) results, which are expected to be announced on January 18.
According to the Department of Basic Education’s (DBE) website, the announcement was scheduled for Friday.
But Umalusi spokesperson, Lucky Ditaunyane, said they were still on schedule and in the process of finalising the standardisation process.
“There was confusion about the item. On Friday we have a private approval meeting between Umalusi and the DBE, thus paving the way for the media announcement on January 18.
“Umalusi uses the historical profile of each subject per qualification to make determinations about learner performance.
“Depending on qualitative and quantitative data presented to Umalusi, learner marks may be adjusted downward, upward or left as they are (raw),” said Ditaunyane.
At least 700 604 candidates wrote the exams.
During the Umalusi Standardisation meeting DBE director general, Mathanzima Mweli, said the 2021 class was disrupted over the past two years.
“The crucially important foundation that Grade 11 work builds in preparation for Grade 12, was weakened. We will therefore see the deleterious effect of lost teaching time, in particular on those subjects that are time intensive such as the languages.”
National Professional Teachers’ Organisation SA (Naptosa) executive director Basil Manuel cautioned people about high expectations, saying it would be strange if there would be a drastic increase in the pass rate.
“We obviously don’t know the pass rates yet. But what we are saying is that our prediction is that we can’t see an improvement in the results given the 2021 matrics were far more disadvantaged because the grade 11 of 2020 had a 50% attendance.
“There were great gaps and teachers spent every weekend and holiday teaching to make up for the gaps, but not every pupil might have been there. Not every school would be able to do that but most schools did try, especially the poor schools.
“Advantaged learners had tuition and did not necessarily suffer backlogs,” Manuel added.
Education activist Hendrick Makaneta said of importance will be the emphasis on the gap that still persists between IEB schools and public ones.
“We are also hoping to hear Umalusi reassuring South Africans that no paper was unaccounted for particularly in the Free State province where a marking centre was hit by a tornado.”
Cape Times