The Department of Education (DOE) is investigating failures in its computer system, which it says caused the delay in the release of the 2008 matric results.
The Integrated Examinations Computerised System (IECS) is a Web-based system, which was implemented by the DOE to capture learners' marks. The system was developed specifically for the 2008 Grade 12 examinations across the country.
In December, education minister Naledi Pandor failed to release the results of 56 810 matrics.
According to the department, the minister has now appointed a team consisting of DOE officials, along with officials from Umalusi - the council for quality assurance in education - to “investigate the extent of the problem”. The team will report its findings to the minister at the end of the month.
The department also states that task teams have been set up to visit provinces and investigate all systemic problems experienced with implementation of the IECS.
List of problems
The Mpumalanga Department of Education said in a statement that the “system [IECS] proved to be extremely challenging”.
With the release of matric results last year, the province reported 9 000 cases of outstanding results. Currently, the results of 2 589 learners in the province have not been released and the department has promised those results will be finalised by 26 January.
A statement released by the Mpumalanga provincial education department highlights some of the main issues with the system. It says the system provided conflicting reports - in some cases where no marks have been captured, the system reflected the status of the mark sheet as captured and verified.
In addition, there were errors in the document trail system and cases of duplicate registrations of learners who had more than one name, it notes.
On 29 December, the Mpumalanga province discovered 245 mark sheets captured, but hanging in the system, while some learners did not appear at all on mark sheets. The IECS system also rejected a mark sheet if the marks for one learner were outstanding.
In some cases, the results of a learner are captured and verified, but the system failed to result the learner, while some learners are not resulted although all marks have been captured and verified.
The learner identification systems also uses the examination number as reference point and not the identity document number where learners share the same names, making it difficult to identify them.
The department reported that mark sheets which indicated errors could only be fixed by 29 December by the system developers and that computer operators had to go through a time-consuming process to go through many steps to create mark sheets.
There were also insufficient report options as the system could not put all the marks of one centre in one document - making it difficult to control what is outstanding.
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