A piece of good news and a piece of bad news all in the same sector in South Africa – that’s what Mzansi is contending with this week. Earlier it was reported that there was a substantial increase in the pass rate of this year’s matric, now it has emerged that there will be rewrites as the authorities have spotted some irregularities.
The Eastern Cape Department of Education has just announced that 216 pupils from Pakamani Senior Secondary School in Butterworth will not receive their matric results today, Thursday, as a result of irregularities that the authorities noticed.
There had been an investigation into the continuous assessments and irregularities were reportedly found with the project materials and with the marking. For this reason, the students will not be receiving results for the exams already taken but will have to retake them.
The prospect of a rewrite appeared to have provoked a wave of worry among students, some of whom fear that the rewrite would cost them a year.
But Mahlubandile Qwase, head of the Eastern Cape’s Department of Basic Education (DBE), allayed the fears of students, noting that the retake would not hamper the students academically in any way as they would not miss the deadline for university entrance examinations.
