{"id":292186,"date":"2019-01-03T19:40:21","date_gmt":"2019-01-03T17:40:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=292186"},"modified":"2019-01-03T19:40:21","modified_gmt":"2019-01-03T17:40:21","slug":"south-africas-real-2018-matric-pass-rate-is-under-50","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/lifestyle\/292186\/south-africas-real-2018-matric-pass-rate-is-under-50\/","title":{"rendered":"South Africa’s ‘real’ 2018 matric pass rate is under 50%"},"content":{"rendered":"

DA Shadow Minister of Basic Education, Nomsa\u00a0Marchesi says that the fanfare over the 78.2% matric pass rate for 2018 obscures the truth behind the result – that close to half of the children who started school with the class of 2018 didn’t make it.<\/p>\n

“Nearly half the learners who enrolled in Grade 1 in 2007, didn\u2019t write the full-time matric exams in 2018 as they were expected to. These learners are either stuck repeating grades or being lost to the education system completely,” she said.<\/p>\n

Marchesi’s sentiments echo concerns raised by civil group Equal Education, which warned that the show around the release of the matric pass rate was “misleading fanfare”.<\/p>\n

According to the group the truth of the matter is that a large portion of the learner cohort in school in grade 2 never makes it to matric – and the current pass rates obscure the fact that many of these children are left behind.<\/p>\n

In fact, looking at the same cohort and where they were in grade 2 and again in grade 10, shows that the true pass rate in the country is around 40%.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn contrast to the department of basic education\u2019s (DBE) claim that the matric pass rate has consistently been above 70% over the past few years and that it is increasing, a look at the throughput rate suggests that the pass rate has actually been declining and ranges between 41% and 37%,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

For the 2018 cohort, the education minister reported that\u00a0approximately 512,700 full-time candidates, and 117,660 part-time candidates actually wrote all seven subjects of the 2018 NSC examinations.<\/p>\n

While 630,360 wrote all seven subjects, 1,031,821 learners were part of the cohort in grade 2 in 2008 – thus over 170,000 learners who registered for the exams are yet to complete their NSC, and a further 230,000 were ‘lost’ somewhere along the way.<\/p>\n

Extrapolating the data further, with 78.2% of learners passing the NSC exams (492,941), when weighed against the full cohort, this is closer to a ‘real’ pass rate of 47.8%.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The true pass rate isn’t exactly clear, however, with Equal Education noting that without access to more detailed data, this metric remains rather crude.<\/p>\n

“It is affected by learners who repeat grades or leave school to attend technical and vocational education training (TVET) colleges.<\/p>\n

“Nonetheless, detailed analysis released by the DBE itself suggests that when these factors are considered, the real pass rate still hovered just above 50% for the past couple of years \u2013 a far cry from the 70% plus pass rate touted by Minister Motshekga every year,” the group said.<\/p>\n

\n

Read:\u00a0The truth about South Africa\u2019s \u2018misleading\u2019 matric pass rates<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DA Shadow Minister of Basic Education, Nomsa\u00a0Marchesi says that the fanfare over the 78.2% matric pass rate for 2018 obscures the truth behind the result – that close to half of the children who started school with the class of 2018 didn’t make it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":108219,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9876],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-292186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle","tag-headline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292186"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":292190,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292186\/revisions\/292190"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}