Indiscriminate Advancement and the Matric Pass Rate

South African Journal of Education, 19(3): 197-206, 1999.

Author – Raphael Gamaroff

See “A horrendous timebomb.” (Mail & Guardian, January 30 – February 5, 2004)

1. Introduction
2. Historical and educational context
3. Criteria for admission to MHS (Mmabatho High School)
4. Method
5. Results
6. The prediction of academic achievement
7. Generalisability of the findings
8. Conclusion
9. References

1. Introduction

The former DET (Department of Education and Training) Grade 12 (“matric”) results have been disappointing for a number of years, and usually required substantial adjustments upwards. There was a decline in the DET pass rate from 48% in 1985 to 41% in 1991 to 38% in 1993 (Calitz, 1998:14). The results have not been much better since the dissolution of the DET after the democratic elections of 1994. The overall South African Grade 12 pass rate (i.e. not only the DET results) of 1995 was 55,2%, which was almost 3% lower than 1994 (St Leger, 1995a:1). The overall university exemption rate for 1995 was 17,9% for all races. Of this 17,9%, 78% was for Indians, 55% was for whites, and 11% was for blacks (St Leger, 1995b:4). The overall 1997 Grade 12 results were worse than 1995, with an average 49% pass rate for the country, with some provinces as low as 35% and 45%.

Various reasons for the low pass rate have been suggested in academia and the media. Reasons given in academia were: the low level of English proficiency of learners (Young, 1987), Bantu Education (Hartshorne, 1987), the medium of instruction and learning from Grade 5 onwards (English) is a language which is non-cognate to the learner’s first language (Mascher, 1991), and low academic ability (Gamaroff, 1995a, 1995b, 1997a). Reasons in the media were: the irrelevance of the contemporary school system to real life, the absence of a culture of learning and teaching, an impoverished primary school and preschool background, a pass-one-pass-all mentality, the demoralisation and disillusionment of teachers, the irresponsibility of teachers, the poor administration by the Minister of Education and by the provinces, a lack of commitment from the business sector, strikes encouraged by teachers’ trade unions, and a general breakdown in society.

Without doubt all these factors have contributed in some way to academic failure. There is one other factor, however, that has not been mentioned, namely, automatic promotions through the grades. According to the editorial in Educamus (1990:3) and Calitz (1998:14) the educational casualty figures would have been much higher if automatic promotions, or indiscriminate advancement, had not occurred in individual schools from one grade to the next. The report “Investigation into the causes of the unsatisfactory 1989 Std 10 [Grade 12] results chaired by R.R. Motau states:

At some of the schools visited, there was the view that it was not necessary to have condoned marks/results approved officially. A decision was taken by the school or teacher on whether a pupil should pass or fail and the marks were adjusted accordingly. No criteria existed in terms of which marks were condoned. (Educamus, 1990:3)

This indiscriminate advancement, Educamus maintains, started in the primary school. Educamus (1990:3) cites the following data to substantiate its claim:

In November 1988, approximately 84 per cent of the pupils in Primary School passed their final examinations, as did approximately 66 per cent of the pupils in Std 6 to Std 9 (Grade 8 to Grade 11). The pass rate for Std 10, however, was only 40,6 per cent. The sharp decrease in the pass rate of the Standard 10 pupils in comparison with the rest of the standards is an indication that promotions in the lower standards leave much to be desired.

These statistics indicate that much appears rosy in the garden until harvest time – the matric examination. One would think that if the Grade 11 results were a true reflection of the learner’s worth, a Grade 11 pass (an internal examination) would be a good predictor of success in Grade 12 (an external examination). As far as I am aware there exists no empirical evidence to substantiate the claim that indiscriminate advancement occurred through the Grades at former DET schools. This article investigate this matter, where English proficiency tests and Grade 6 reports are used to predict the Grade 12 (matric) pass rate.

In previous research (Gamaroff, 1997b), I investigated the predictive validity of English proficiency tests where academic achievement from Grade 7 to Grade 12 were used as the crierion variables. In this article, a comparison is made between the predictive validity of the English proficiency tests and the Grade 6 reports. The results strongly suggest that the Grade 6 reports were highly inflated, which in turn suggests that indiscriminate advancement through the grades occurred at former DET schools.

The tests were conducted at Mmabatho High School (referred to henceforth as MHS) in the North West Province of South Africa were I spent over seven years (January 1980 to April 1987) as a teacher of second languages (English and French) and researcher in the learning of English as a second language (Gamaroff, 1986).

Learners at MHS wrote the JMB matriculation examination, whose results were regarded as a better predictor of tertiary academic achievement than the Senior Certificate examinations offered by the DET and the examinations offered by the other education departments in South Africa (Mitchell & Fridjhon, 1988; Mathonsi, 1988; Peirce, 1990; Simpson, 1987). In recent years the predictive validity of the DET matriculation results has been reinvestigated, where some researchers confirm the poor predictive validity of the DET matriculation results (e.g. Yeld & Haeck, 1997) and others disconfirm the poor predictive validity of the DET matriculation, in particular with regard to the mathematics and science results (e.g. Zaaiman, 1998).