How the Matric Examinations Are Structured

The National Senior Certificate, commonly called matric, is the main school-leaving qualification for learners who complete their final year of schooling through the public school system. This page explains how the examination itself is put together.

Subject choices

Every candidate for the National Senior Certificate must take a defined set of compulsory subjects and a number of elective subjects, usually adding up to seven subjects in total.

Two official languages, one taken at Home Language level and one at First Additional Language level, or in some cases two Home Languages.
Either Mathematics or Mathematical Literacy.
Life Orientation, which is assessed internally through school-based tasks rather than through a written national exam.
Three or four further elective subjects, chosen from areas such as the natural sciences, social sciences, commerce, technology or the arts, depending on what a learner's school offers.

The specific electives available depend heavily on the resources and staffing of the individual school, which is why subject choice often needs to be made in consultation with the school well before the final years of study.

School-based assessment and the final exam

Each subject's final mark is built from two parts. School-based assessment, sometimes abbreviated SBA, is a portfolio of marks built up over the year from tests, practical work, projects and other tasks set according to guidelines from the Department of Basic Education. This component is moderated at school, district and provincial level to check that standards are consistent across schools.

The second part is the external examination, written on a set date under standard national conditions, using a question paper that has been set centrally and approved by Umalusi before use. Depending on the subject, there may be one, two or three separate examination papers, each testing different aspects of the syllabus, for example a theory paper and a separate practical or data-response paper.

The overall weighting between school-based assessment and the final exam varies by subject. In most subjects the external exam contributes the majority of the mark, which is intended to ensure that the final result reflects a nationally comparable standard rather than only the internal judgement of an individual school.

Marking and moderation

After the examinations are written, scripts are marked by trained markers appointed by provincial education departments, following a memorandum approved centrally for each subject. A sample of marked scripts is then remarked by senior moderators to check consistency, and Umalusi conducts its own independent verification of the marking process before results are approved for release.

This process, known as standardisation, can in some cases involve statistical adjustment of raw marks in a subject if the performance in that subject's papers is judged to be significantly harder or easier than in previous years. The intention is to keep standards comparable from one year to the next, rather than to change the ranking of individual candidates within a subject.

Independent schools and the IEB

Learners at many independent schools write a parallel set of examinations set by the Independent Examinations Board rather than the Department of Basic Education paper. The IEB examinations are based on the same national curriculum and lead to the same National Senior Certificate qualification, but the question papers, and in some respects the assessment approach, are set separately by the IEB and are also subject to Umalusi's quality assurance.

What the certificate shows

The final National Senior Certificate records a result for each subject the candidate took, along with an overall qualification level. Depending on the marks achieved across all subjects, a candidate may qualify for a Bachelor's Pass, a Diploma Pass, a Higher Certificate Pass, or a plain National Senior Certificate pass, each of which carries different implications for admission to further study. The specific combination of subjects and marks needed for each of these outcomes is set out in the official admission requirements published by the Department of Basic Education and by individual tertiary institutions.