Before we get into the thick of it, the last two years have been incredibly tough. A global pandemic and lockdowns have seen chaos playing out in the education system but the Matric Class of 2022 weathered the storm, even in the face of pervasive loadshedding.
In the National Senior Certificate exams, the Class of 2022 achieved a pass rate of 80.1 percent. This represents a 3.7 percent improvement on the 76.4 percent achieved in 2021.
“The Class of 2022 is the first cohort to write the NSC exams, post the pandemic. Exacerbating the devastation caused by the pandemic, this class was subjected to the challenges of enervating load shedding and sporadic service delivery protests,” Basic Education Minister, Angie Motshekga said at an event on Thursday.
Drilling into the numbers, Free State learners were the top achievers registering a pass rate of 88.5 percent. Gauteng learners came in just behind their Free State peers with a 84.4 percent. The province with the biggest improvement was in KwaZulu-Natal which improved its pass rate by 6.2 percent to 83 percent.
The good news is that no provinces went below a 70 percent pass rate while five provinces performed well above that waterline.
Of concern however is the number of students who achieved a Bachelor’s pass. As SA News reports, of the 922 034 students who registered for the 2022 exams, just 278 814 achieved a Bachelor’s pass. This means just 30.2 percent of learners who registered for Matric exams will be eligible to study at university.
Some good news, no-fee schools improved their pass rate by 9.2 percent while the number of Bachelor passes increased 13.4 percent.
“The significance of this enormous and unequalled achievement is that the gap between the Bachelor passes produced by ‘no fee’ schools, versus those produced by fee-paying schools, has significantly and progressively increased from 2% in 2015 to 16% in 2020, to 24% in 2021 and 25% in 2022,” said Motshekga.
For the Class of 2022 who want to check their results we’ve compiled a variety of ways to check your results here. Unfortunately, the Department of Basic Education didn’t prepare its digital services for an influx of visitors and its website is down as of time of writing.
For learners who didn’t achieve the results they were hoping for, the Second Chance Matric Programme opens for registration on 20th January.
We also urge learners who are feeling particularly low about their results to contact a friend, a loved one or the South African Depression and Anxiety Group.
Congratulations to the class of 2022. No matter your results, you just completed 12 years of schooling and that alone is feat worth celebrating.
[Image – Vasily Koloda on Unsplash]
