A blurred signal? The usefulness of National Senior Certificate (NSC) Mathematics marks as predictors of academic performance at university level

View/ Open
Date
2010Author
Schöer, Volker
Ntuli, Miracle
Rankin, Neil
Sebastiao, Claire
Hunt, Karin
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Internationally, performance in school Mathematics has been found to be a reliable predictor of
performance in commerce courses at university level. Based on the predictive power of school-leaving
marks, universities use results from school-leaving Mathematics examinations to rank student applicants
according to their predicted abilities. However, in 2008 the structure and scope of school-leaving
examinations changed in South Africa from the former Senior Certificate (SC) to the new National Senior
Certificate (NSC). This structural break seems to create fluctuations in the signalling ability of the schoolleaving
marks. South African universities are unsure about how well the current NSC Mathematics marks
reflect the underlying numerical competence of students, given that a high number of the 2009 student
intake failed their first-year core courses across faculties. This paper estimates a deflator for the new
NSC Mathematics marks relative to the former Higher Grade (HG) Mathematics marks, by comparing
performance in similar first tests of two commerce subjects, Economics 1 and Computational Mathematics,
between the 2008 and 2009 first-year cohorts. The results indicate that the signalling ability of the NSC
Mathematics marks is reduced significantly. Instead of differentiating students according to their abilities,
the new NSC Mathematics marks compress students with a wide range of abilities and disabilities into a
very narrow range of percentage marks.