Do the maths: weaker pupils, lower standards
Umalusi must come clean on whether ‘progressed’ pupils made it necessary to adjust results in 28 subjects to make them look better, writes
WITH few exceptions, there is no such thing as “too much information” in an open society. Our democracy lives and breathes only as long as citizens have access to the information they need to hold informed opinions and take informed decisions.
Nowhere is the need for transparency more acute than in education — the key determinant of a person’s chances in life. It is everybody’s right to know how the matric papers are marked, how they are moderated and how the marks are adjusted during the standardisation process.
The quality council for education, Umalusi, acknowledges this in its handbook on standardisation. In the preface, Umalusi refers to its “commitment to making its processes transparent to all who have an interest in the examinations Umalusi quality assures and certificates”.
Despite this, Umalusi has shrouded the standardisation process for the 2016 exams in secrecy. In refusing to openly answer questions related to standardisation, it has placed its credibility in jeopardy.
We know that 32 of the 58 matric subjects had their marks adjusted during the standardisation process before the results were announced this month. Of the 32 adjusted subjects, 28 had their marks adjusted upwards and four downwards.
Some of the subjects saw a dramatic upwards adjustment. Mathematical literacy, for example, was adjusted from an average raw score of 30.06% to 37.22%. According to Umalusi, it was justified in raising the raw marks to bring them in line with the historical mean (from 2011 to 2016) which, in the case of mathematical literacy, was 37.20%.
There is nothing wrong with standardisation. Done properly, it is vital to ensure that the standard of the National Senior Certificate is maintained, and that learners in a particular matric year are not advantaged or disadvantaged relative to other CHORE: Matrics write exams at the Ngwayibanjwa Senior Secondary School in the Eastern Cape years. Upwards (and downwards) adjustments are warranted — and indeed necessary — if it can be shown that the examinations were harder (or easier) than in previous years.
The problem is that Umalusi refuses to provide evidence that the examinations for the 28 subjects in which there were upwards adjustments were harder than in previous years.
Just this week, Umalusi refused to provide the DA with the external moderators’ reports on each examination. Why the secrecy? What is Umalusi afraid of?
The need for transparency has been heightened by concerns that the matric marks were adjusted for reasons not related to the difficulty of the examination papers. To understand this, we need to look at the impact of including “progressed” learners in the standardisation process.
A progressed learner is one who has been pushed through to matric despite not meeting the pass requirement for Grade 11, in line with the Department of Basic Education’s progression policy. This is the second year that the policy has been in force. According to Umalusi, 109 400 progressed learners (13.4% of the total enrolment) wrote the NSC examination in 2016, up from 66 088 in 2015.
This raises the question of whether the inclusion of progressed learners in the standardisation process led to a drop in standards.
Let us go back to the example of mathematical literacy to illustrate. Last year, according to Umalusi, 389 015 pupils wrote maths literacy. We do not know precisely how many of these were progressed learners, but it is likely that most progressed learners would have opted for maths literacy instead of the more cognitively demanding mathematics (it is compulsory to do one or the other).
Given this, it follows that the drop in the subject’s raw mark (30.06%) from the five-year historical mean (37.20%) may not have been due to the increased difficulty of the examinations. There is every possibility that the drop in the raw mark was because of an increase in the number of progressed learners who wrote the examinations.
Under these circumstances, it is difficult to see how adjusting the mean raw score upwards by 7.16 percentage points — as Umalusi did — can be justified.
We need to know: does the inclusion of progressed learners in the standardisation process create additional impetus to adjust the marks upwards, for reasons not related to the difficulty of the papers? And if so, does this not mean a drop in the standards of a matric pass?
Another unanswered question is the propensity to adjust upwards when the raw mark is lower than the historical average, but to keep the raw mark unchanged when it is higher than the historical average. This happened in eight subjects, iner’s cluding physical science and history.
At the standardisation meeting to decide on the adjustments, there was little interrogation of why — in these cases — the raw marks were better than the historical mean, and whether this could have been because the papers were “too easy”. Instead, the relatively higher raw mark was accepted as a welcome sign that the system is improving.
Why? Why was the comput- recommendation of a downward adjustment rejected in these eight cases, but its recommendation of an upward adjustment accepted in the 28 cases mentioned earlier?
Umalusi will say only that we must trust the experts who conduct the standardisation process who, we are assured, are people of the highest integrity.
We have no reason to doubt their integrity, and there may very well be good answers to all the questions we have asked. But we need to hear these explanations and be persuaded. As responsible citizens, we cannot simply accept things at face value. We need to probe and interrogate to make sure that the public interest is served.
We spend one-fifth of our budget on basic education, and we are blessed with many excellent teachers. With the right policies and the political will, we can build a truly world-class education system for every child.
But we will only get there if we are fastidious about keeping our matric pass to a certain standard, and are transparent about the processes. Umalusi would do everyone a great service by opening its processes to public scrutiny.
Davis, a DA MP, is the party’s spokesman on basic education
We will only get there if we are fastidious about keeping matric to a certain standard