Matric results will be out at midnight on Tuesday and at schools on Wednesday morning, local teachers have told the Courier.
However, it is widely expected that the national pass rate will be lower than in 2014 as a result of the high number of “progressed” pupils last year.

This is according to Professor John Volmink, chairman of Umalusi, the Council for Quality Assurance in General and Further Education and Training, in an interview with The Times.

The Department of Basic Education has ruled that a pupil can repeat grades 10 and 11 only once. If he does not meet the requirements for promotion to the next grade, he must nevertheless be “progressed”. The rationale for this is that it reduces the number of “unnecessary school dropouts” and gives every pupil the opportunity to leave school with a senior certificate.

The policy on progression was implemented in 2013 to prevent pupils being retained in the same phase for more than four years.

Umalusi maintains that the performance of progressed pupils accounted for, at most, 3.5% of the increase in the 2015 failure rate.

Said Prof Volmink: “There was a drastic increase of 124105 in the enrolment of [matric] candidates in the Class of 2015, of which over 66088 were progressed learners.”

In 2014 “there were an estimated 30000 progressed learners writing the National Senior Certificate examination”.

Other factors contributing to the poor matric performance last year, said Umalusi, included improved marking standards, a higher number of borderline candidates and the higher standard of the exam papers.

Volmink said “the standard of the papers catered for more challenging questions as compared to 2014” and “it can be argued that the standard of the question papers was too high this year”.