VOC received a call from a concerned listener regarding a FET College 2014 exam results after an entire classroom of students failed with the same percentage. Throughout the year, a mother told VOC, her son had always been a successful student however, at the end of the final matric year in 2014, he had failed along with his other classmates. This sparked the suspicions of parents. After much investigation, VOC has discovered that this particular problem is not an isolated incident, instead the same scenarios have been recorded at other respective FET Colleges nationwide.

Shedding light on the recent discovery, Deputy Principle at the College of Cape Town, Ebrahim Peters explained that the students in question had been working towards a NCV qualification.

NCV qualification is a national examination qualification, which ranges from levels 2,3 and 4. It covers a wide range of FET college programs from engineering, business studies, IT etc. The exams are set in the same way as the matric examinations and it follows the same procedures.

“When the results were made available to us in January, we immediately noticed a drastic decline in the overall pass percentage of the level three results,” he said.

Soon after, Peters said other teachers at the six other FET Colleges in the Western Cape had also come forward with their concerns after receiving the results.

“We were very concerned. We then made enquiries and found that all our colleagues had the same concerns. Six colleges in the WC raised their concerns with the department. On Thursday, the department indicated that there had in fact been an error in calculations,” Peters added.

“We informed the department that this case was unlike the other cases of discrepancy regarding the final results.
This case is extraordinary. They had then indicated an error in calculations in the results.”

In response to these concerns, the department’s Chief Directorate for the National Examinations and Assessment (CDNEA) said it had tasked the State Information Technology (SITA) to investigate the accuracy of the National Certificate NCV level 3 results. SITA then confirmed the error in the moderation dataset used to process the final subject results.

“The Moderation Dataset has been corrected and the resulting processes were run again. Umalusi as the quality assurer needs to validate the new dataset before CDNEA may release the corrected said subject results,” the department said in its statement.

“We communicated all this to students so that they are aware however, parents were extremely upset. The trauma so many students experience with regards to their final results is something we are extremely aware of. This has never happened before. We need to be fair to the department as this is highly unusual,” Peters further said. VOC (Ra’eesah Isaacs)