A striking feature of matric results is the increasing prominence of female top achievers.
Girls lead the way in achieving distinctions - in 2008 they got 78 854 distinctions in all subjects compared to 48 015 by boys.
Last year, 300 000 girls wrote matric compared to 251 000 boys.
Of those who passed, 34% of the girls got a university entrance pass compared to 31% of boys.
Curiously, however, failures by girls (40.5%) were slightly higher than for boys (38%).
This is in contrast to other countries where females typically graduate from high school at a higher rate than males.