Umalusi has rubbished news making the rounds that it had asked for an extension for the matric results to be made known.
PRETORIA – Despite matric candidates cheating during the exams – even after signing a pledge to remain faithful days before they could sit for their exams – Umalusi has rubbished the news making the rounds that it had asked for an extension for the matric results to be made known.
Umalusi spokesperson Biki Lepota confirmed during a media briefing that the news was false and completely misleading.
The Council for Quality Assurance in General and Further Education and Training, Umalusi, held a briefing in Pretoria on Monday on the 2022 national exam results of the public and private assessment bodies.
Umalusi has approved the release of the matric results and they will be released on Thursday by Minister of Basic Education Angie Motshekga.
The briefing addressed the results of the National Senior Certificate (NSC), National Certificate Vocational (NCV: L2 -L4), Nated report 190/191 (N2 – N3) and General Education and Training Certificate: Adult Basic Education and Training (GETC: Abet).
Over 1.2 million candidates sat for the 2022 November exams. The NSC had 940,366 candidates and the NCV had 166,184 candidates.
During his remarks, Umalusi CEO Mafu Rakometsi said the delay in releasing the results was due to thhe knock-on effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. He said teaching, exams and standardisation of results had all been affected.
“The schools started late in 2022 as a result of the knock-on effect on the disruptions of 2020 and 2021. The schools had to do a lot of catching up as the class of 2022 has suffered the full impact of the pandemic. The catching up programme needs extra time for the schools,” he said.
He added that the exams and processes that flow from the commencement of exams started later than usual, “hence the late release of results”.
However, Rakometsi extended his gratitude to the Department of Basic Education (DBE) and other relevant bodies for putting measures in place to ensure that limited time was lost.
Even though load shedding and community protest action were a problem, Rakometsi applauded the bodies that made alternative arrangements to maintain the situation.
Meanwhile, the CEO mentioned that they were concerned over cheating allegations that emerged from some of the exam centres.
According to the cheating reports that Umalusi received, different forms of cheating were uncovered in some centres during the exams.
These included candidates found in possession of crib notes and cellphones, sharing of answers via WhatsApp groups, imposters were found in the exam rooms and some answer scripts had different handwritings.
Rakomesti said decisive steps would be taken against pupils and officials implicated.
“Based on the magnitude of the offences, different sanctions have been meted against the candidates involved, such as the nullification of the results, barring the candidates from writing the exam for either 1 or 2 exam cycles,” he said.
Further, he said there were no leaks of exam papers and that should be celebrated on its own. Dealing with problematic question papers, Rakometsi said that some of the questions were excluded from the marking process.
He highlighted the following as the papers that had problems: Independent Exams Board (IEB), history paper 2 (NSC), English (GETC), and on DBE, maths literacy paper 2 and Sepedi home language 2.
“These problematic questions resulted in marking concessions being applied for by the relevant assessment bodies for them to be excluded either entirely or partially from the question papers. Some of the requests for marking concessions were granted, whereas others were rejected,” he said.
