South Africa’s declining maths performance is a worrying

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.