Imagine you’re a NSC candidate in 2025, that examination everyone tells you is a make or break test of your future.
Then you hear in the media that three papers leaked — mathematics, physical science, and English home language.
Your heart sinks, you sweat, the family around you panics.
Does this mean my results in those papers are null and void?
Will we all be required to re-write those papers?
You don’t feel you have the emotional or intellectual energy to do that again.
This is the tremor that shook SA’s matric families and their children when the minister of basic education announced the leaks.
To her credit, she played open cards with the public.
Minister Siviwe Gwarube explained what happened, that the culprits had been identified, that action had been taken, and that the impact of the scandal was limited to 26 pupils across seven schools. As far as we know, I must add.
The minister was correct not to name the schools.
That would cause huge reputational damage to the schools when the cheating was done by individuals — not the institution — who had participated in this scheme.
How were these scoundrels caught?
Well, it appears that two officials from the department of basic education gained access to the exam papers as well as the memoranda of marking, the detailed specifications of the correct answers.
When examiners saw that the answers of some pupils were replicas of the “memo”, this understandably raised alarm bells.
How stupid must you be to write the exact wording and terms from the answer sheet and replicate it in your exam paper?
The question remains: how exactly did an official working in the department get access to these papers and their memos?
Surely there are tight mechanisms in place to prevent that from happening?
If there was a memory stick download, as speculated, how did that person get into a high security space?
Something is off here.
We have had decades of experience with exam management and security. How did this happen?
The DBE owes the public a detailed explanation.
That said, I’m a political realist. As long as you have a single, high-stakes examination affecting almost one million candidates, the attack on the security system around it will be relentless.
This is a country in which it can now be safely said there is a culture of corruption that has beset every aspect of society, from someone’s couch in the presidency to traffic officers declaring their birthdays on the very day they pull you off the road for some infringement.
We need to accept that under these conditions, we will never have a foolproof examination security system.
What are the alternatives?
A national school-leaving certificate that measures basic skills and understanding, a mathematical literacy kind of examination for all subjects.
Then, a national examination only for those applying to university (or other institutions), something akin to the national benchmark tests that some university administer despite the NSC exam.
In other words, release the pressure of this high-stakes examination and, with it, some (not all) of the pressure to cheat.
In the meantime, the DBE must apply the harshest penalty for the cheats.
The two officials must never again be employed in a government department unless there is a restorative justice process that unfolds over years.
The cheating pupils must be barred from writing for at least three years.
Once again, where there is remorse and regret, we need to be open to restoration.
For now, we should stop feigning surprise that these things happen. The stakes are too high.
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