Staff Reporter<\/p>\n
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IN an appeal against the rewriting of Grade 11 and 12 ordinary level exams next year as instructed by the Ministry of Education, the Association of Private Schools in Namibia (APSN) has proposed ways to limit further demoralisation and find a solution for the benefit of learners.<\/p>\n
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The Ministry\u2019s decision came after the leak of exam papers.
In a letter to the Executive Director of Education, Arts and Culture, APSN chairperson Colette Rieckert requested co-operation between relevant stakeholders and the Ministry, and offered suggestions to solve the issue.<\/p>\n
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These include the restarting of Grade 11 exams before the end of the year, not rewriting subjects of which papers were leaked, not publishing Grade 11 results, as well as identifying guilty parties and giving them an ungraded.<\/p>\n
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The full letter of appeal reads:<\/p>\n
APPEAL AGAINST REWRITING OF GR 11 & 12 ORDINARY LEVEL EXAMS IN JANUARY 2022:
With the news breaking about the leaking of exam papers and memos of some(most) subjects in the Grade 11 & 12 Ordinary level exams, our Association of Private schools, wish to share the following ideas with you, and propose a better way to handle this problem:
1. The first basic principle in the law is that a person cannot be punished until he\/she has been found guilty. Learners who already wrote off some of their Grade 11 papers, cannot be punished by having to rewrite the subjects that they already completed. Only a few are guilty.
2. The court case last year in SA where the Department of Education ordered the rewriting of exams of 2 papers that were leaked, was won against the Department, because they said it had a wide-spread effect, but could not prove the real effect of it. In the end the rewriting was cancelled and only the individuals were punished with an ungraded. In the end only 200 out of 400 000 matrics were affected, which is minimal.
3. If Grade 11\u2019s rewrite all these subjects in January, the results will probably not be available before middle of March, which leaves too short time to prepare for AS in 2022.
4. Teachers who were supposed to mark in December\/January 2022, cannot be released for marking of all Gr 11 O-level papers, as many of these teachers are responsible for the teaching of learners in Grades 10 & 11 as well \u2013 then the academic studies of these grades will be in full swing.
5. Many Grade 11 learners destroyed the notes of subjects that they would not continue with, thus they will not have the benefit of preparing from personalized notes that they put so much effort into during their school career.
6. Do not give a list of top performers of individuals or schools for gr11 for 2021. Do not even publish the results \u2013 simply supply this to schools and the individual Grade 11\u2019s. We can expect that this would be skewed, and we do not want to give recognition to learners who do not deserve it. Unfortunately, the rest will be sad because they do not get the recognition that they deserve, but I am certain not having to rewrite exams will be much better for them.
7. Learners who abused the leaked answer papers, can be identified by:
– Comparing their answers to the memo \u2013 the markers will know if this is too much in agreement with the memo.
Many external markers that I have spoken to, said that they will be able to identify these cases easily.
– Comparing their regular performance to their normal performance at school \u2013 if they performed exceptionally well and their history of performance at their school is not so good, the learner can be punished.
8. Identify the learners who were involved and punish them by giving them an ungraded, but do not let all learners repeat all affected subjects \u2013 apart from the discomfort this will cause, it will cost huge amounts of money to repeat basically the whole exam.
9. If a few of the cheating students get away with it, and progress to AS-level, they will only waste their time next year in any case, because they will not be able to master the AS-level.
10. Our children are already demoralized and their mental health exasperated because of Covid-19 and the economic recession. To add this type of anxiety and pressure on them, will be detrimental.
11. To date, it is only the Physics paper of today that was not written. We can circulate new paper, that I understand the Ministry has in stock for all the papers that must be written from next week. The printing and circulation can be done quickly and we are more than willing to assist with this. Then Gr 11\u2019s can complete writing their exams. We could even give a new date for Physics in the next week or two (with new papers). In this way we will avoid further damage in the 2022 school year.
12. This damage is huge to our curriculum and reputation of the Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture. But it is what it is. Now we must work and plan together to limit the damage that has been done, to the benefit of the majority of our Grade 11\u2019s who worked so hard in this exam to achieve optimally to progress to Grade 12.
13. The Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture must ensure that security measures are increased in order to protect the integrity of examinations to avoid such occurances in the future.
Summary of our request:
1. Get the Grade 11 exams restarted and write the papers that are possible before the end of the year, with new papers distributed for subjects where the old papers were leaked. Try to fit in the Physics that were meant to be written on 2 December.
2. Do not rewrite the subjects of papers that were leaked. Identify the cheating learners and
give them an ungraded, with an opportunity to appeal against it, by providing sound academic results and consultations with the principals.
3. Do not publish any Grade 11 results.
Should you have any further questions in this regard, you are welcome to contact me.
Yours truly, Colette Rieckert Chairperson: APSN<\/p>\n\n\n
Staff Reporter \u00a0 IN an appeal against the rewriting of Grade 11 and 12 ordinary level exams next year as instructed by the Ministry of Education, the Association of Private Schools in Namibia (APSN) has proposed ways to limit further demoralisation and find a solution for the benefit of learners. \u00a0 The Ministry\u2019s decision came …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":311415,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n