Schools under the IEB system have taken an approach to sharing curriculum content to its grade 12 students that would allow the pushing of as much content as possible in preparation for Preliminary and End-year examinations.
A typical school year for the Matric learner would consist of three sets of exams during the latter half of the year. These include the June exams, Preliminary exams (Prelims) that take place between August and September, and Final-year exams which tend to begin between late October and early November of the year.
With the pandemic having caused a delay to the academic year of 2021, the examination schedule is one of the few things that have changed to accommodate the grade 12 curriculum.
The June exams have been completely removed at IEB schooling institutions, leaving only two sets of exams for students to write; Prelims and Finals. As of June, there has not been any communication regarding a change to these two sets of exams thus, they are set to commence as usual.
Private schooling institutions, such as Curro Hazeldean, have also been said to have altered their teaching programmes to ensure that students have been taught the entire curriculum before exam season begins.
At Curro, because there have been no June Exams, students are still required to go to school each day. However, it is said that classes are currently being taken in keys that can sometimes be as long as 100 minutes each, to allow ample time for content to be consumed by students.
The students have also been writing tests that seem to take the form of mini-exams that can sometimes take up to two hours to complete. All of these new measures have been an attempt to prepare students for exams, being that none of the students have had formal exams in the year of 2021 thus far.
