EDITORIAL: Matric results a mixed bag
The encouraging national matric results for 2016 continue to raise questions about the quality of the numbers and of the matric itself
There is much that is encouraging in the national matric results for 2016 that Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga released this week, but there is, as always, much in the numbers to prompt concern, and confusion. The matric pass rate has risen to 72.5%, which is up from the 70.7% to which it fell in 2015 after following an overhaul of the curriculum. It has also been policy for the past two years to "progress" pupils who had failed Grade 11 more than once to matric. That meant a weaker cohort of pupils wrote in 2015 and again in 2016, when the number of progressed pupils was much larger than before. Excluding those progressed pupils, the pass rate has increased to a more robust 76.2%, which takes it back to 2014 levels and Motshekga has hailed the fact that the pass rate has stayed above 70% for six years now. That is not spectacular, but it is not terrible either. And although poorer rural provinces still do much worse than more urban ones, and poorer schools do worse than mo...
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