Matric exams will be written amid security clamp

WITH this year’s matric exams just around the corner, the Department of Education is tightening up security.

Chief director of national assessments and public examinations Dr Rufus Poliah yesterday addressed the media on the department’s state of readiness before the exams.

“Over the years we have come to realise that one of the problems we have is the security of our question papers,” he said. “Particularly I think in the past two years it’s about whether our schools can be trusted with the administration of an exam.”

Both the 2014 and 2015 matric exams were marred by group-copying scandals.

This year, the department had audited exam centres and storage points.

Poliah said that together with provinces, the department had categorised centres in terms of their risk profiles: high, medium or low.

At centres with high-risk profiles – because of previous irregularities – the department had ether placed a resident monitor from outside the school or had taken over the management of the exams.

Poliah said the proportion of high-risk exam centres was “probably less than 1 percent”.

“The highest risk is at independent schools, not public schools,” Poliah said. “There are more independent schools that write the state exam than write the IEB (Independent Examinations Board) exam.”

And, he added, independent schools were profit-making institutions and subject to certain pressures.

Of the storage points audits, Poliah said question papers would not be stored at storage points that did not comply with the department’s security requirements and protocol.

Poliah also said exam officials would be waking as early as 3am during the exam period to deliver question papers on a daily basis, and that printing was being done at a provincial level.

Other changes included the extension of the centralised marking pilot-project.

Last year, four exams were marked centrally. This year, 10 will be marked centrally in Pretoria.

It was a logistically demanding exercise, Poliah said, and the exams that would be centrally marked were for subjects with small enrolments such as tourism, dance studies and second additional languages.

It’s now about whether schools can be trusted