Govt blocks attempts to reduce examination pass mark

The Chronicle

By Vusumuzi Dube

26 January 2013

THE recent decline in the 2012 Advanced Level pass rate has been attributed to the examinations being difficult with reports that the Zimbabwe Schools Examination Council (Zimsec) tried to reduce the minimum examination pass mark, a move that was blocked by Government.

This comes amid revelations that Government will this year tighten monitoring mechanisms in the education sector to ensure that students perform much better.

The country’s pass rate for 2012 marginally dropped to 82,09 percent from 85,2 percent the previous year according to statistics released by Zimsec last Thursday.

The number of students who sat for A’ Level exams last year increased by 45,9 percent to 36 678 compared to 2011 where they were 25 139 candidates.

According to the figures, females performed better than their male counterparts, as they recorded a pass rate of 83,78 percent compared to the male figure of 80,83 percent.

The highest passed subject was Food Science with 96,95 percent, followed by Ndebele at 94,7 percent while the bottom two subjects were Geography with 54,27 percent and Accounting with 38,27 percent.

In an interview with Sunday News Education, Sports, Arts and Culture Minister David Coltart said he had personally issued an instruction to the examinations council not to decrease the minimum benchmark, as this would have a negative bearing on the country’s education sector.

“Yes, I am obviously worried on this decline but I personally gave an instruction to Zimsec not to meddle with standards because we want an honest assessment of how we performed so that we know what we have to do for the next examination period.

“Let’s not forget that we are slowly emerging from the 2005 — 2008 period where our students hardly had access to any textbooks, teachers were hardly in class and the country’s education standards were declining. However this decline must not be taken as a true reflection of the education standard as a whole,” said Minister Coltart.

He said his ministry was working round the clock to help revive the nation’s education standards, which included attracting back qualified teachers who had left the profession.

“Right now we have managed to bring back over 15 000 teachers  into the system. We will also be going ahead with our teacher retraining programme so as to help improve the overall service delivery and our students get the best possible services,” said the minister.

He said there was also a problem where they had a high number of unqualified teachers in the system thus the need for them to roll out a training programme for these teachers.

“We have come up with a new computerised education management system that will be linked to all our district offices, where we will be constantly monitoring teachers and see that they are always in the classrooms,” said Minister Coltart.

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