Angie Motshekga, Minister of Basic Education, has announced that the matric pass rate for 2019 is 81.3% – which is up by 3.1 percentage points from the 2018 pass rate of 78.2%.

186,058 students achieved a bachelor’s pass, while a further 144,762 achieved a diploma pass.

Free State had the highest pass rate, with 88.4% of students from the province attaining their matric certificate.

Gauteng, North West, Western Cape, Mpumalanga, and KwaZulu-Natal all also achieved pass rates in excess of 80%.

In contrast, the Northern Cape, Limpopo, and the Eastern Cape achieved the worst pass rates in the country, with 76.5%, 76.5%, and 73.5% of matric students passing in these respective provinces.

Matric pass rate from 1995 to 2019

The matric pass rate has climbed substantially over the past 25 years, but experts say this has come at a cost.

Professor Jonathan Jansen previously said that passing Grade 12 in South Africa “means very little” due to the lowered standards of local exams.

This was recently confirmed by South African maths experts, who told MyBroadband that maths standards have dropped substantially in recent times.

“They get their A for matric maths, for which they and their parents and their teachers and the Department of Basic Education are happy, but the next year they discover that their A has not adequately prepared them for university mathematics,” said Professor John Webb of the UCT Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics.

“More and more students entering university are not autonomous learners, and do not have the needed critical thinking skills to be successful in university mathematics,” added Ruan Moolman, UCT lecturer and founder of the Academy for Maths, Science, and Technology (AMSAT).

The table below shows the matric pass rate in South Africa from 1995 to 2019.