Silly battle over matric results and privacy

A whole R5 million threat to the department of basic education because they want to let the newspapers publish matric results. Now the courts have to deal with it.

Because when you don’t think of streamlining your legal system and just trying to patch things together, you land up with some hilarious combinations.

Imagine a system where you have legislation to promote access to information next to legislation to inhibit it on the basis of it being personal and private.

Throw in a regulator who takes a very broad interpretation of privacy and a department which thinks there’s importance to publication and you get some interesting results.

I won’t even go into the Rica Act and the effects it should have that everybody conveniently neglects to talk about.

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Sometimes, you can’t help to look at the setup and think, “What is going on here?” In the case of matric marks, it’s a combination of what is going on here and why even bother?

Are we trying to sell more newspapers?

Are we trying to improve access to marks?

Are we trying to waste ink?

It’s an interesting situation that we find ourselves in where we can cast the accusation of stupidity on both sides of this debate. That’s pretty apt given how a South African matric is hardly worth much anyway.

Who is going to care if the marks are published in the newspapers? Is there anybody in 2024 who will rely on getting their marks from the newspapers? Is there anybody who will go to the effort of breaking into the department of basic education to get the exam numbers of certain pupils to cross reference them in the newspapers so that they can find the pupils to laugh at?

If there were those kinds of people, we’d probably laugh harder at them for not just stealing the results straight from the department.

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It just seems like such unnecessary posturing and existence justifying. What information is the regulator trying to protect and why are they so invested in this specific issue?

Are they not aware that nearly every government building requires that you sign a registry with your ID number, address and contact information that the next 20 people who enter the building will be able to see?

The sincerity of this battle is hardly convincing when this is the biggest news of the regulator and department all year… and it’s a fight about a whole lotta nothing.

However this goes, can there even be a winner? Will the pupils come out any better by not having their results published against an examination number?

Will the department come out any better if newspapers can publish results? Will the regulator come out any better if they stop this kind of publication? The only real answer to all of those questions is another question, “do they have nothing better to do?”

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Sure, point made. If you can trace the result back to the pupil then there may be an issue, especially for pupils who perform poorly and may be embarrassed. But that’s not what’s on the table.

There’s a lot that can be said about matric results; the formulas to adjust them, the increasingly pushed release date and the DA’s annual “real” pass rate template.

What you cannot say is that it’s a big deal whether or not they’re published. Having this kind of fight over is both ridiculous and a waste of good court time.

This is probably part of the reason the pupils aren’t alright. Could the department put some effort into the things that really matter, like making the marks mean something?

It’s pretty pointless to fight to publish results when the value of those results is increasingly questionable. Oh, and the regulator should probably focus on regulating things that matter.

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