Durban - Matric watchdog Umalusi says it will take a hard line on exam cheating and does not believe there will be any nasty surprises when this year’s results are released.
Mafu Rakometsi, the chief executive of the quality assurer, said on Wednesday that this year’s June exams were a good omen - they had proceeded free of the sort of cheating which more than 1 000 KwaZulu-Natal pupils and 457 Eastern Cape pupils from the Class of 2014 had been accused of.
Rakometsi was speaking in Durban, at a seminar for principals and life orientation teachers, held by the Mangosuthu University of Technology.
He said the decisions taken last year to reveal the “group copying” to the public, and to nip it in the bud, were critical to Umalusi’s mandate.
“We are the last line of credibility,” he stressed.
Umalusi’s job is to ensure the National Senior Certificate matric exams are fair to pupils, and credible.
It monitors the exam process, and checks the question papers and the marks.
While Rakometsi’s address was on “things worth fighting for at your school”, the principals gathered seized the chance to quiz him on exam irregularities, the matric pass requirements, and the relevance of maths literacy.
He assured them that Umalusi did confront exam irregularities, and would not “duck and dive” or be “wishy-washy” in uncovering cases of cheating.
Asked if it was possible that the exam copying had occurred in previous years, Rakometsi said it had never been reported to him before. But given the scale on which it had occurred last year, he believed it had happened before.
He said a “culture” of group copying had taken root, which had culminated in what had been discovered in KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape.
He was not certain the investigations which were under way would be complete by the time the matric class of 2015 swrite their final exams.
This was because the hearings in KwaZulu-Natal had been attacked during violent protests by pupils, and because court action had been launched by an Ndwedwe high school to force the national education department to release their results.
According to the department, a number of pupils had confessed to being assisted by their teachers and principals in cheating.
“What kind of teacher does that? It is a moral issue,” said Rakometsi.
He asked the principals and teachers whether the only expectations South Africans had of schools was their role as “certifiers of basic competency”.
“Many would say that schools are failing if they do not prepare learners conceptually or emotionally to play a meaningful role in society or the workplace,” Rakometsi said.
“When teachers are afraid to share ideas and successes for fear that others might steal these ideas, or alternatively that they be perceived as blowing their own horns, we have reached a point where the school has institutionalised conservatism.
“Our schools are encouraged to have high expectations of their people.
“We must never remove the necessity for both students and teachers to take concerns about the quality and outcomes of teaching and learning seriously.”
Good schools, Rakometsi said, helped one to understand one was not in the world simply to adapt to it, but also to act on that world, and to change it.
The Mercury