Africa-Press – South-Africa. With the release of the 2022 National Senior Certificate results imminent, Umalusi has moved to provide further clarification about a problematic question in Mathematics Paper 2, which pupils were unable to answer correctly.
On Monday, the quality assurance council approved the NSC exam results. The NSC is administrated by the South African Comprehensive Assessment Institute (SACAI), Independent Examinations Board (IEB), and Department of Basic Education (DBE).
Umalusi chairperson Professor Yunus Ballim said while there were irregularities identified, including multiple reports of cheating, they were not of a systemic nature and would not compromise the credibility or integrity of the results.
During the media briefing, Umalusi also raised concerns about problematic questions in a number of the exams.
One of the problematic questions was found in Mathematics Paper 2, which even prompted a three-person independent panel to investigate how the error had crept in, and gone undetected until the DBE administered the final question paper on 7 November last year.
The panel found that the error occurred at the last step in the chain of internal and external moderation, and the language editing and typesetting processes.
Explaining how the error crept in, Umalusi CEO Dr Mafu Rakometsi said: “So, what happened [is], the moderator indicated the questions that need to be corrected, and question 5.1 was not one of them. As the people were looking at the paper again, they realised the font was wrong in a mathematical symbol in question 5.1. They inserted that new font [which created the error].
“When the external moderator looked at the paper again, for the second iteration, he only focused on the questions he said had to be changed; that was just before the paper had to be printed.”He added:
It was decided that no marks would be awarded for the question to remove the negative impact of the error. The question was worth seven marks.
“Therefore, no marks were allocated to Question 5.1 (7 marks), thereby reducing the total of 150 marks by 7 marks to 143. All candidates were marked out of a total of 143 marks, and the marks achieved were converted to a mark out of 150 marks,” Ballim said.
“The mainly upward adjustment of the marks for students in mathematics has dealt with the error in the mathematics paper. Umalusi is satisfied that it has mitigated the effect of the error in the paper through the standardisation processes. The mainly upward computer adjustment served as an additional mitigation factor.”
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On Wednesday, Umalusi gave further clarification on how question 5.1 had been dealt with.
“Further to the statement issued during the approval of the release of the 2022 national examination results on 16 January 2023, Umalusi wishes to provide clarification regarding how the problematic Question 5.1 in Mathematics Paper 2 was dealt with,” a statement read.
Umalusi said the problematic question was excluded entirely to mitigate the possible impact of the error on pupil performance.The following instructions for marking were given:
“This means that a candidate who obtained 23 marks, will be awarded 30 marks,” Umalusi said.
“This resulted in the reduction of the total marks for Question 5 from 30 to 23. For this reason, the marks achieved by each candidate were converted to a mark out of 30 marks as indicated in Table 3 below.
“To exemplify this, a candidate with a 1 mark out of 23 ended up with 1 out of 30 marks, the one whose mark was 12 out of 23 achieved 16 out of 30 marks, and the one obtaining 23 out of 23 marks ended up with 30 marks.
“Due to the quality assurance interventions explained above, taken together with the mainly upward computer adjustment as a standardisation decision, Umalusi is satisfied that it has mitigated the effect of the error in the paper.”
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