The "real" matric pass rate
The DA announced on Tuesday that its leader, Helen Zille, would be writing to Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga requesting an independent audit of the 2013 National Senior Certificate results.
While the celebratory mood continues due to the 78.24% national pass rate, we need to take a hard look at how this high percentage was achieved, and if it is a credible yardstick that can be used to rate the health of our education system.
Our concerns stem from the following:
According to publicly available figures if a calculation is done by dividing the number of learners who passed matric over the number of Grade 10 learners who attended public schools in 2011, the "real" national pass rate works out to 41.7% rather than 78.24%. This drastically changes the "real" pass rates for provinces as follows: Western Cape, 55.3%; Gauteng, 49.4%; KwaZulu Natal, 44.8%; Mpumalanga, 41.9%; Free State, 39.5%; North West, 38%; Northern Cape, 36.6%; Limpopo, 34.1%; and Eastern Cape, 32.3%.
It is worrying that both the Free State and the North West, which scored pass rates of 87.4% and 87.2% have high dropout rates. According to a report, a massive 56.5% of learners in the North West and 54.8% in the Free State dropped out between Grade 10 and 12. The question that arises is, are provinces deliberately ignoring the problem of high dropout rates in an effort to "up" their matric pass rates?