Pretoria - South Africa’s Council for Quality Assurance in General and Further Education and Training, Umalusi, has approved the country’s 2019 national examination results, it said on Friday.
The quality assurance council was briefing the media on the approval of the latest matric results in Pretoria.
The CEO of quality assurance body Umalusi, Dr Mafu Rakometsi said the 2019 matric exams did not have any question paper leaks, which is where we should be as a country.
Umalusi did however raise concerns about the drop in candidate numbers in mathematics and the increase of candidates in MathsLit.
In past years the examinations have been tainted by groupcopying and in some instances, examination papers being leaked.
Professor John Volmink said maths teachers should be supported by the Department of Basic Education in the manner that they teach matric.
The exams were incident free, but there were minor disruptions, said Umalusi.
On the 16 and 17 October the writing of CAT and IT in some parts of the country were affected by loadshedding.
Late last year parents raised concerns about both matric maths papers set this year, which were written in October, as they feared they could negatively affect their children’s final results.
The pupils found that the papers had very few similarities to past papers they had used to prepare.
Parents found that the issue was not isolated to KwaZulu-Natal, and they learned from their associates in other provinces that this was a nationwide problem.
Basic Education Department Minister Angie Motshekga is due to announce the national results for the class of 2019 next Tuesday, while individual results will be available at schools the following day.
The department said it was pleased that the exams concluded successfully around the country with no major incident reported.
Spokesperson Elijah Mhlanga said: "The preparations are going very well. We are in the office and are working.
"We are meeting with Umalusi - it's the final meeting with them - and we will then be in a position to continue with the printing of the statement of results.