Umalusi has sounded the alarm over problematic questions that crept into a number of the National Senior Certificate (NSC) exams.
On Monday, Umalusi, the quality council for general and further education and training, approved the examinations administered by the SA Comprehensive Assessment Institute (SACAI), Independent Examinations Board (IEB) and Department of Basic Education (DBE).
Umalusi chairperson Professor Yunus Ballim said that while there were irregularities identified, including multiple reports of cheating, there were no systemic irregularities that would compromise the credibility or integrity of the examination results.
However, Umalusi said it was concerned about “problematic questions” in a number of exams.
These were questions that were either incorrect or had specific details missing, meaning that pupils could not answer them. More errors were identified in the DBE administered examinations.
Umalusi CEO Dr Mafu Rakometsi listed the errors identified:
- In the Sepedi language exam paper two, one of the questions had an incorrect word.
- In maths literacy paper two, a question, for six marks, erroneously refers pupils to the year 2019 instead of 2020, Rakometsi said, but did not explain how that created a problem in answering the question.
- Perhaps most concerning for Umalusi was an error in the maths exam paper two, which prompted a three-person independent panel to investigate how the error crept in and went undetected until the final question paper was administered by the DBE on 7 November 2022.
The error made it impossible for the question, which was for seven marks, to be answered.
Ballim said the panel had audited four processes linked to the question paper, including, the examination paper development process, external moderating process, editing and typesetting process, and proofreading process.
The panel also evaluated the documents provided and interviewed the examiners, internal and external moderators, and language editors.
The panel found that the error occurred at the last step in the chain of internal and external moderation, and language editing and typesetting processes.
Rakometsi echoed this and said the error was not in the first iteration of setting the paper.
“So, what happened, the moderator indicated the questions that need to be corrected and question 5.1 was not one of them. As the people were looking at the paper again, they realised the font was wrong in a mathematical symbol in question 5.1. They inserted that new font [which created the error].
“When the external moderator looked at the paper again, for the second iteration, he only focused on the questions he said had to be changed, that was just before the paper had to be printed.”
Rakometsi said both the DBE and Umalusi had to take collective responsibility for the error as they both participated in the finalisation of the exam paper.
“It is not an error we take lightly,” Rakometsi said.
“Therefore, no marks were allocated to Question 5.1 (7 marks), thereby reducing the total of 150 marks by 7 marks to 143. All candidates were marked out of a total of 143 marks and the marks achieved were converted to a mark out of 150 marks,” Ballim said.
“The mainly upward adjustment of the marks for students in mathematics has dealt with the error in the mathematics paper. Umalusi is satisfied that it has mitigated the effect of the error in the paper through the standardisation processes. The mainly upward computer adjustment served as an additional mitigation factor.”
With the IEB examinations, issues were picked up with one of the history and English papers.
Rakometsi said that with the history paper two, for two marks, pupils were asked to find a historical context in paragraph two while the answer was in a different paragraph.
In the English exam paper, for four marks, pupils were asked to identify the underlined words and write them out in full, but there were no underlined words.
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