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By Zelda Venter 
16h ago
Pretoria – Matrics can relax: The Department of Education’s plan for them to rewrite a math and chemistry article next week has been shelved.
And they have a series of requests to the High Court to thank, but one name will go down in history: that of first plaintiff Lienke Spies, whose name is on the judgment.
Four groups had submitted applications this week, three of which included a series of matrices, and a fourth by the South African Union of Democratic Teachers, and defended the case until Thursday.
While some arguments and relief measures requested differed slightly, all requests boiled down to the same thing: that the decision announced by Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga last week that two tests should be rewritten was irrational.
Judge Norman Davis heard how Umalusi had been behind the decision to rewrite the two articles after the exam leaks came to light. They told him that the minister was “intimidated” by Umalusi, who cited the integrity of the NSC.
The Gauteng High Court in Pretoria ordered on Friday that none of the documents would be drafted next week, and the department should continue to mark the original dashes; about 339,000 on Math Test 2 and 282,000 on Physical Science Test 2.
Judge Norman Davis noted that the decision had not been successful. It was a decision that no reasonable person would have made, considering the facts.
He also criticized the attempted justification of the rewrites on Tuesday and Thursday, considering the biases raised by the applicants, and said allegations of injustice that would arise from subjecting hundreds of thousands of innocent students to a rewriting process were justified.
The judge noted that only about 195 students who wrote the math essay may have benefited from the leaked questions, a small percentage. An even smaller percentage (60 students) may have benefited from the physical science article.
“Umalusi’s conclusion that such a negligible percentage has so irrevocably damaged the integrity of these two documents that they cannot be certified cannot be upheld,” the judge said.
Umalusi, he said, tried to bolster his position with repeated claims that the actual scope or extent of the dissemination of the leaked documents, though unknown, may have gone “viral.”
This fear was more apparent than real, since in the first week after the leak was discovered, only 195 students who received the “what” app with the math questions could be identified.
Even if events after the decision were taken into account, as the minister argued, separate investigations and interviews of students conducted at one school revealed a maximum of four students who may have had access to the documents, he said.
All but one indicated that they had only received the messages after they had written the exams. “One would have hoped, in a case of this magnitude or extraordinary nature, that no stone would have been left unturned to further determine the extent of the leak.”
The judge said there was a complete absence of evidence of the alleged “viral” spread and no rational basis on which proposals by all interested parties that a final decision should only be made after subsequent investigations are concluded should not be the Come on way. “
And, even if the extent of the leak was a hundred times greater than what had been identified, the question remained whether a 6% commitment would result in non-certification, something Umalusi had not considered.
Even if the decision to rewrite these two articles was rational, there was no justification for doing it next week instead of January.
The judgment cites Spies as the first defendant, with Gerhard Burger, Izak Jacobus Arnold and Christiaan Swanepoel as the second, third and fourth defendants, and Afriforum as the fifth defendant.
In another case, Unami Bhembe, Itumeleng Nkambule and Marne van der Merwe are the respondents, while the other has Itha Wessels, Eesa Omar, Pheelo Moeketsi, Alanis Gomes and Nomonde Radebe, all matrias.
Pretoria News
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