African languages flagged
A RED flag has been raised about the standard of matric exams in African languages, which seem much easier than exams for English and Afrikaans.
The ministerial matric exam task team said the standard of the African languages home language papers had repeatedly given rise to questions over the past five years. The issue had been controversial, not only in public, but also in interactions between examination authorities and the Department of Basic Education.
“One key issue that has arisen as a criticism of the NSC is that the mean scores are very high in the African languages compared with Afrikaans and English and all other subjects in the matric exam.
“On the raw scores, learners writing Xitsonga and Tshivenda papers attained an average of more than 70% in 2013, which is disproportionate to their performance in other subjects.
“Furthermore, whilst the mean scores for African languages are all above 60%, the mean scores for Afrikaans and English are below 60%.
“Only in the case of candidates writing Afrikaans home language or English home language was passing the home language examination a good predictor of whether or not they were likely to pass the matric exam overall.
“For instance, in Afrikaans, of the learners that achieved less than 39% for Afrikaans home language, 80% failed the total exam. Of those who achieved 60%-69% only 1.3% failed; at 70%-79% only 0.3% failed and 80%-100%, only 0.1% failed the total exam.
“Despite some slight differences, the overall pattern for the English homelanguage group was very similar.
“This was not found to be the case for
The mean scores are very high compared with . . . all other subjects
all the African languages. In particular in isiZulu about one-fifth (22%) of the learners who obtained 70% and above in isiZulu home language failed the total exam.”
It said a similar pattern was found in Ndebele, Sepedi and Xhosa.
The task team said it believed these figures based on a broad body of data must be troubling, and that a thorough investigation into the standard of African languages at home language level was required.