Johannesburg - The number of forged matric certificates is increasing, and the situation is unlikely to change soon, it was reported on Friday.
Validation processes in 2012 established that 23 percent of matric certificates were questionable, compared to 21 percent in 2010, Ina van der Merwe, CEO of Managed Integrity Evaluation (South Africa's largest company qualifications validator), told Beeld.
Certificates labelled as a risk were those containing information not in line with what was available.
Van der Merwe told the newspaper that in some cases, points and subjects were tampered with to reflect that candidates had qualified for admission to tertiary institutions.
In other cases, people bought fake certificates after failing or dropping out of school.
The quality of fraudulent certificates varied: in some cases they were amateurish, resembling a computer printout, while others had issues that were harder to detect with the naked eye.
Van der Merwe said the fraud was symptomatic of a country experiencing recession pressures. - Sapa