The Passmark for Students in South Africa

What I fail to understand about the South African school system is the fact that a child can receive a passing grade in any subject by obtaining only 30%. This means that you do not even need to know one third of the subject content in order to say you have passed.

To my way of thinking this is simply madness. Would you allow a mechanic to work on your car if he only understood 30% of your engine? Not likely. Our education system is expecting children to go out into the world and apply the skills they have learned at school, but many of them have less tha one third of the knowledge that the system tried to teach them.

I understand that much of the content a child is required to learn at school does not inspire their interest meaning that it would be difficult to learn and obtain a high pass rate. I do not expect everybody to be capable of obtaining 90% in subjects, but I believe that no matter what your level of studying ability or interest may be, obtaining 50% in a subject should be an absolute minimum.

The problem in South Africa is that I education system is so weak, particularly from a teaching and administration point of view, that were we to introduce a mandatory 50% pass mark at Grade 12 level, the majority of our learners would end up failing. The education department has therefore decided to lower the pass rate to this ridiculous level in order to boost overall pass rates thereby deceiving people into believing that their system is working.

The basic problems in the education department cannot be swept under the rug or hidden via artificial statistics. The results of the system are plain to see at tertiary education level. Universities, in particular, are increasingly having to resort to giving bridging courses to students in order to lift their skills to the level required to understand the course for which they had originally qualified. This, in my opinion, is a waste of money and resourses. Money and time is having to be spent on students to teach them the skills that the education system and its paid teachers were supposed to have done in the first place.

The education department seems to be realizing their mistake as they have raised passing levels at the junior grades to 50%. Whether this is going to be continued into the senior grades is still open to debate. Before this can be done, the inherent problems within the system need to be addressed otherwise the disaster we are currentlky facing will only be compounded.

All stakeholders from parents, teachers, administrators and even the pupils themselves nedd to get together and have open discussions without apportioning any blame so that a workable solution can be found. We are currently training the people that need to lead our country both politically and economically in the future. If we do not solve this problem urgently, we are going to become another third world country which, with our mineral riches, will be a ripe takeover target for any economic power. Knowledge is power and without knowledge we will be unable to defend ourselves economically.