Matric pass rate set to drop: Umalusi
Umalusi says the 2015 class of matriculants writing the department of basic education's National Senior Certificate exams performed worse than last year's class
"There are a number of factors that affected this year's learner performance, which we hope we can correct," Umalusi council chairperson Professor John Volmink told reporters in Pretoria.
He said the poorer performance could be due to the high standards of this year's papers, but they could not compromise on the quality of education, he said.
"The standard of the papers improved and catered for more challenging questions as compared to 2014. The standards of the papers might have contributed to the perfomance, but the standards can't be dropped just to push up the failing rate," Volmink said.
"Umalusi can't lower the bar for standards. They can only be improved in the classroom."
Meanwhile, the department of basic education says it will only comment in January on the announcement by Umalusi regarding the poor matric results for 2015.
The department's spokesperson, Troy Martens, said they would be commenting when the minister announced the results.
"We are only releasing the results on the 5th of January so we don't want to pre-empt any of these announcements. We will comment when minister pronounces," she said.
Umalusi approved the release of the results despite a few examination centres being implicated in group copying.
The results of learners from those centres would be withheld until investigations were completed.
A total of 26 alleged cases of group copying were reported in four provinces: Gauteng (6), KwaZulu-Natal (12), Limpopo (1) and Mpumalanga (7).
There were others that were implicated in the leaking of exam papers. Those results would also be withheld.
The results would be released next week.
(File photo: Gallo Images)