Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga. Picture: Bongani Shilunane/African News Agency (ANA)
Pretoria - The Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, will later this week hear an urgent application to reverse the decision by Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga that the two leaked exam question papers be rewritten by all matric learners.
Civil rights organisation AfriForum is assisting four learners in lodging the urgent application.
Several unions, including the SA Democratic Teachers Union, are also planning on challenging the minister’s decision.
Lawyer Willie Spies, acting on behalf of the four learners, said the lawyers will ask that each learner who was not involved in the irregularity have their exam papers marked and results released.
They want the minister to be interdicted from destroying any answering scripts on any of the two exam papers, pending any review proceedings regarding her decision to call for a rewrite of the two papers. Motshekga announced on Friday that matric learners had to rewrite the final exam in maths paper 2 as well as physical science paper 2.
The minister had apparently based her decision on an interim report on about 195 learners having seen the question papers.
Most learners who had gained access to the papers are members of a WhatsApp group of top achievers selected by the department itself for preferential treatment and support.
Natasha Venter, adviser for education rights at AfriForum, said rewriting the two exams would unfairly disadvantage about 400 000 matrics who had written the exam honestly.
“The department should focus on the guilty persons. There are means to determine which learners did gain unfair benefit from the leaked papers.
Research has shown that learners’ marks in final exams can be determined with 93% accuracy by studying their preceding marks. We cannot allow Motshekga to disadvantage honest learners because the department’s systems were inadequate to prevent exam leaks.”
Pretoria News