THE DILEMMA OF EQUATING EXAMINATIONS AND ASSESSMENT STANDARDS FOR THE NATIONAL SENIOR CERTIFICATE IN SOUTH AFRICA

THE DILEMMA OF EQUATING EXAMINATIONS AND ASSESSMENT STANDARDS FOR THE NATIONAL SENIOR CERTIFICATE IN SOUTH AFRICA

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THE DILEMMA OF EQUATING EXAMINATIONS AND ASSESSMENT STANDARDS FOR THE NATIONAL SENIOR CERTIFICATE IN SOUTH AFRICA

Learner assessment and standard setting, has always been an issue of discussion, not only among professionals but also in public. Broadfoot (2002:5) indicates that the search for an unambiguous and dependable way of measuring “,ability”, is indeed one of the enduring themes of assessment research in the 20th century. Further to this, the tension between the scientific aspirations of assessment technologies to represent an objective reality and the unavoidable subjectivities injected by the human focus of these technologies is very much in evidence in most countries (Davies, 2002, 185 –, 204). Indeed, as Moss &, Schutz (2001: 37 –, 70), argue, it is the process of generating standards, and in particular, the possibility of extremes that do not conform, that is an essential dynamic of education quality and innovation.The generation and setting of standards becomes even more of an issue in countries where examinations and assessment mediate university entrance. Access to institutions that are both catering to a mass market, and are very important to people’,s life changes, is almost bound to be a vexed and a political issue (Bakker &, Wolf, 2001, 285). Democracies demand fairness and objectivity, and equal opportunity for access. This is especially true in the South African context, where the emergence of a new democratic state in 1994 ushered changes in various social arenas including education, where “,the dialectical dying out of the old and the birth of the new”, (Lubisi &, Murphy, 2002:255), has to account for the diversity in standards that still exist. The consequent introduction of a new exit level examination (NSC) the FET-phase complicates matters even further and questions are raised about standards and standard-setting...

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