Matric results: Marks adjustment is fair and will carry on forever – expert

While the adjustment of marks for matriculants has been hotly debated and criticised, the practice is not new and is likely to stick around for a long time.

This approach has been adopted since 1918, during the era of the former Joint Matriculation Board.

The class of 2021’s marks were released on Friday with the Department of Basic Education (DBE) achieving a pass rate of 76.4%, compared to 76.2% for the 2020 matric group.

With more than 800,000 pupils sitting for the National Senior Certificate (NSC), 28 subjects were adjusted upwards.

The 28 subjects are 48% of the 67 written subjects and included tourism, history, physical science, accounting, and English home language.

The Independent Examination Board (IEB) adjusted 14 of the 65 written subjects, resulting in 21% of subjects adjusted upwards.

The history of adjusting marks

The approach to adjusting and standardising marks dated back to 1918, used during the era of the Joint Matriculation Board until 1992.

This continued from 1992 to 2001 under the new South African Certification Council and then from 2002 to date by then newly established quality assurance body Umalusi.

This adjustment approach is not only used by the basic department of education but also the IEB, the department of higher education and training as well as the South African Comprehensive Assessment Institute (SACAI), Umalusi explained.

Pre-democracy, this approach applied to pupils of all races and does not look at individual marks but the whole matric population, said Umalusi spokesperson Lucky Ditaunyane. 

“All the racially-based departments of education pre-1994 applied standardisation principles. At the heart of standardisation is comparability of marks (distribution) for the whole cohort per subject from one year to the other. In other words, the process does not look at individual marks for the whole population – males, females, Africans, Indians, Whites, Coloureds, etc. It focuses on marks achieved, not who achieved the marks,” said Ditaunyane.

Visit The Citizen’s matric portal to view your results and see who South Africa’s top performers are.

How do these adjustments work?

There is no set formula to figure out how marks are adjusted but this is instead done from subject to subject and year to year.

“The sources of variability include the following: difficulty in question papers, undetected errors, learner interpretation of questions and other extraneous factors other than the learners’ knowledge of the subject, abilities, and aptitudes,” said Ditaunyane.

But these adjustments should not exceed a 10-percentage point or the historical norm, he said.

“That is, no adjusted mark should be beyond the norm or historical average; no adjustment should exceed 10 percentage points. It is not a formula, but principles which pre-date South Africa’s democracy.”  

Education expert and senior associate researcher at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) Mary Metcalfe said as a quality assurance board, the best statisticians in the country work with Umalusi to ensure results are fair and comparable.

“Umalusi has some of the country’s best statisticians for the standardisation process. When they adjust up and down, it has got a strong scientific basis. I tend to defer to the statisticians and trust the standardisation process. It happens in every country. If you have an overall quality assurance body, its responsibility is to make sure that [pupils] are not advantaged or disadvantaged because of slight differences in quality questions, etc.”

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While other education experts, as well as the public, have criticised the mark adjustments, Metcalfe said such opinions could be influenced by the perception that the department of basic education wanted to present itself in a good light.

“The public needs to understand that the DBE is an examining body like the IEB. They have to take all of their raw marks and all of their processes to Umalusi. Umalusi is independent of the DBE and the IEB and its job is to say these results are certified to be fair, accurate, and comparable”.

“The adjustment of marks] is going to carry on forever,” Metcalfe concluded.