The Minister of Basic Education is confident that her department is ready for the challenge of the National Senior Certificate exams that learners will start to write on Monday (21st October 2024).
Its a mammoth operation with 727,121 full-time learners and 155,215 part-time candidates writing one or more of the exams in this session. The number of full-time learners has grown by about 40,000 but the part-time number has dropped by about 30,000. This might be because these candidates also now have the option of writing in June so may have chosen that date instead.
Minister of Basic Education Siviwe Gwarube addressed the media on Sunday to confirm that her department was prepared for the exams and everything was ready for the learners to start writing. She did call on communities to avoid protests that could lead to matriculants being prevented from writing one or more of their exams.
Of the total of 882,336 learners writing these exams the majority are writing the national, government papers. However there are also 16,400 writing the papers set by the Independent Examinations Board (IEB) and 5,820 writing the exam papers compiled by SACAI.
However there are also about 18,000 learners who attend independent/private schools but still write the state examination papers.
No matter what papers the learners write for the National Senior Certificate they are all moderated and approved by Umalusi, the quality assurance board for further education.
Once the papers have been written, the action will move to marking. The national Department has employed about 55,000 temporary staff for work as markers and they will operate at 188 marking centres, spread across the country.
The Deputy Minister was also on hand to confirm that the Department was not hampered by a shortage of markers. He explained that the problem was mainly around the languages where there were 3 papers to be marked. This includes English, Afrikaans and Afrikaans second language papers. However plans have been put in place to stagger the marking of these papers so that the shortage of markers in these subjects won't cause a problem.
The national marks will be announced by the Minister on the 15th January 2025 and individual results will be available the next day.
