Darryn Lee, UCT online school spokesperson
In response to “Online high school ‘ruined our future’” (Plainsman, January 29), in addition, the South African Comprehensive Assessment Institute (SACAI) has clearly defined procedures in place for those who are dissatisfied with the grades they have received, and we have guided and encouraged our learners to approach the SACAI in the prescribed manner to request a review or a re-mark of examination papers where they believe that this is called for.
UCT Online High School is aware of the complaints and comments, many of which are based on partial information, and some of which has been egregiously misleading. Our team is engaging with our examination body, the SACAI around these issues, and have had a recent, constructive discussion with the SACAI leadership team. We are taking every query raised with us with the utmost importance. Each of these queries are being reviewed and where relevant escalated to the executive head of school who has then queried directly with SACAI for further feedback. We remain committed to supporting our 2024 matric cohort.
At UCT Online High School, we follow the National CAPS-aligned curriculum, and utilise the SACAI-provided support and guidance documents to ensure that the content covered for our learners is what they will be examined on in their final National Senior Certificate exams.
We gave our 2024 Matric class full support throughout their Grade 12 year. Support coaches were continually available to every learner, and we provided direct support through subject-specific boot camps and other forms of learning to allow each learner to focus on those parts of the curriculum that required their attention. All learners were strongly encouraged to attend mastery sessions, in which our subject matter experts went through past examination papers, helping them to prepare for their final examinations.
We closely follow the requirements of the National Senior Certificate CAPS curriculum in designing and supplying our online content for all our grades. We continually test our learners’ grasp of this material in the tests that are built into our study modules, providing the feedback that each learner needs to provide focus in their studies. We take particular care in ensuring that the questions we set in our School-based Assessments (SBA) are fully aligned with the curriculum. All our marking is conducted by qualified teachers who are subject experts, and our SBA marks are moderated before being released to learners. I can confirm that, for last year’s Grade 12s, all SBA results were submitted to SACAI as required and on time.
Given our continued engagement with our examination body, we are not able to comment further until our work with SACAI has been concluded.