This year, 2008, was the first year that South African matric students wrote the OBE cirriculum. Now it’s been an unfortunately long time since I was in high school so I don’t truly understand the differences but reports were coming in that this year would be doom and gloom for matrics due to teaching issues and misunderstandings. When the results did come out there was a 62.5% pass rate. This isn’t exactly great and was less than the previous year but it certainly isn’t as bad considering this is an entirely new system. Education minister, Naledi Pandor was proud and as a nation we weren’t that unimpressed.
Unfortunately it was all a lie.
You see, the Department of Education has been witholding on us. They failed to mention the nearly 10% of marks they just forgot to release. Well “forgot” isn’t quite the correct terminology but these marks have been witheld for reasons such as suspected cheating, teacher incompetence and other irregularities.
Let’s take a second here to look at some numbers and logic. The national average was a 62,5% pass rate but this is a group of dubious students. I’d estimate that this means a pass rate of only 50% of these students actually passed, a number I think is fair considering the above facts. What this means is that if we convert the current pass rate to only reflect the 90% of the population and add the (generous) 50% average pass for those students excluded you get a lot closer to 60% pass rate. Now one or two percent in the greater scheme of things isn’t exactly a lot but frankly lying to get your stats up is hardly acceptable.
Every percent counts and what’s interesting is that for every ten percent extra failures for those who’s results have been excluded we loose almost a percent on the national average. If only thirty percent of those waiting pass then we drop under 60% and get to the point where we reach panic levels.
OBE is not a failure just quite yet but for me it’s quite telling that in Australia, after 25 years of using the system they are looking to change it.
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