
South Africa’s declining maths performance is a worrying - iafrikan
https://www.iafrikan.com/2020/05/09/south-africas-declining-maths-performance-is-a-worrying/
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goose847
Adding to this: I finished high school 3 years ago with a distinction for
Mathematics from inevitably one of the ‘top 200’ schools mentioned in the
article.

I read an article about a year ago showing the change in the syllabus for
Maths over the last two decades and it was quite disturbing to see how the
quality of the questions has decreased.

The upshot of this is that unfortunately even getting a distinction in the
subject says very little about how you will fair in University. I very nearly
had to repeat first year maths at UCT (also mentioned in the article). I
really shudder to think how those with even less access to proper resources
might have fallen by the wayside as a result of their circumstances.

In SA high schools it is increasingly common to take ‘maths literacy’ instead
of the more intensive maths subject. This is once again skewed against
students from poorer schools where they don’t have good maths teachers and
therefore see higher rates of students taking this ‘maths lit’ course which is
limited to real world algebra problems without an introduction to calculus or
any tools that students would need to succeed in university.

