The Cheating Game

The matric results have been in the news, somewhat controversially, over the last two weeks. And there have been a number of issues surrounding this year’s results. 

Firstly, there was a move to publish ID Numbers and not names because the Department of Education tried to encourage kids to go to their school to collect their results where there were teachers and other people to assist them if they found out that they failed. As opposed to reading it in the newspaper and going and hanging yourself in your father’s garage. Suicide after the matric results come out is a huge problem... We place so much emphasis on these results here. 

And of course we can’t move away from the fact there was all this alleged cheating during the matric exams this year. Apparently, there’s a new trend in cheating these days – what they’re calling “group copying” and “narration”. 

And the way they realised this was becoming a problem was when the markers were going through a batch of scripts and everybody had written something like “go ahead” on the first page... And every single script had these words written at the exact same place. And the conclusion was that you had to have had a teacher at the school standing in front of the whole group narrating the answers and the learners would all just copy it down. That’s the theory anyway... 

Now if this indeed happen, what astounds me is that within that group of kids writing the exam, there wasn’t a single reported whistle blower... Someone, even anonymously, should have said this is the story. But not a single kid did! So what does this tell us about the values we’re teaching our kids in this country? 

So there’s obviously an investigation now and Umalusi is saying they won’t release the results from those examination centres. It’s about 58 or so examination centres across the country and they are finding more. The majority came from KZN and the Eastern Cape. But the North West, Limpopo, Gauteng and the Western Cape had one or two. This cheating is unacceptable; and of course any amount of cheating is unacceptable, but there is also a tendency to be slightly histrionic about it. 

And it all comes as a result of high stakes testing. We’ve seen it in the United States... Recently, there was a huge scandal in Atlanta, where the entire state was under investigation...  So we can’t say that it only happens here. In the US, they introduced a lot of high stakes testing, which means you write a final exams and that’s what determines your pass. So it’s high stakes in terms of it being a pass or fail situation. 

And our matric year is like that. 75% of your mark is for the matric exam. 25% is for your school-based assessments. So everything you’ve done in the entire year is only 25% of your mark. And that’s also the culmination of 12 years of schooling in one exam, which is for 75%, so that’s very high stakes! 

So in Atlanta they introduced this kind of high stakes testing and, and their situation is a little different because teachers were being held accountable based on those results. So you could lose your job, or be passed up for a promotion and that kind of thing, so they were assisting learners with the answers and they found that it was huge and endemic across the entire state – there was this constant cheating happening. And this group copying was happening there long before we heard about it here. 

So with this move towards high stakes testing, this kind of cheating takes place. We are an assessment obsessed education system. And one needs to have a broader understanding of this context. Education systems around the world are in disarray – they largely don’t service the needs of the current knowledge economies. And that’s acknowledged; you see it in the high dropout rates at universities, we have low throughput and low performance in so many fields of study. 

And even though we have a prescribed syllabus here, not all children are taught all the content, because in many instances they don’t have teachers who are qualified enough to teach that content. And this is a huge issue that needs to be addressed! And the excuse is we don’t have the capacity to address it! 

Equal Education, which is an NGO in the Eastern Cape, that deals with inequality in education, did an analysis in what they call The Real Matric Pass Rate. And they say this is about 40%. 

What they do is they look at it on a cohort basis, and they exclude Grade 1 because there is higher grade repetition here. So what we have is a million kids that come into the schooling system in Grade 1 and they look at how many of those kids actually make it to Grade 12 – half a million? 

So already 50% have not even made it to matric so taking that into account, that means 50% have failed – add to that the 78 or 80 percent pass rate, so 20% failed. 

In fact, we only have a 30 or 40% pass rate in matric. So that’s the real matric pass rate if you take into account half a million kids don’t even make it to Grade 12. And these kids drop out because they have repeated too many times during their 12 year schooling and things like that and they become unemployed and sit at home. 

So this is the bigger picture, which we have to look at.          

Political commentator Angelo Fick was commenting on this issue on eNews recently and he said we have this tendency to say that everybody should go to university, we’ve made that the end game... But we need to have a reality check and take note of the fact that we need artisans, we need technicians... So there are a whole range of options that we need to start exploring to address the skills shortages as well, and we need to start building our capacity to start delivering those.

I agree! 

You can email Terence Pillay at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter: @terencepillay1 and engage with him there.