dyton mupawaenda
Remember Deketeke
Herald Reporter
Grade Seven results for this year were released yesterday, with a higher 49,01 percent pass rate, significantly up from 45,57 percent last year, due to better teaching and with girls on 53,68 percent on average doing better than boys on 43,99 percent.
The Zimbabwe School Examinations Council (Zimsec) attributed the increased pass rate to better teaching following interventions by the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education in advancing and upgrading the teaching and learning process, ensuring more pupils received better teaching.
The results were available on the Zimsec online portal as of yesterday, starting at 3pm with heads of schools able to collect the printed results from their Zimsec regional offices on Monday.
Announcing the results and the 3,44 percentage points improvement in the pass rate, Zimsec chairperson Professor Eddie Mwenje said: “The 2024 Grade Seven examination recorded a national pass rate of 49,01 percent for candidates who sat for six subjects.
“This is an increase of 3,44 percentage points in the performance from last year’s pass rate of 45,57 percent. The increase in pass rate can be attributed to interventions by the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education in terms of teaching and learning.”
All subjects saw pass rates above 50 percent with two, Shona and Physical Education & Arts, going above 80 percent. One new optional subject, for the indigenous languages, was Xhosa with a pass rate of 72,41 percent although few wrote this subject.
Girls not only on average did better than boys, but more of them sat for the examination. Prof Mwenje said of the 387 429 candidates who sat for the 2024 Grade 7 examination 199 939 were girls while 187 490 were boys.
Prof Mwenje said: “Generally, there was an increase in the pass rate in all the subjects with the exception of less than one percent decrease in Shona and Xichangani,” he said.
A total of 328 special needs candidates sat for five or six subjects.
“Of these 194 wrote six subjects and 134 classified as hard of hearing sat for five subjects yielding an overall average percentage pass rate of 37,19 percent for all learners with special needs. In 2023 the pass rate was 42,99 percent and there were 357 candidates,” he said.
“It is important to note that there has been a steady increase in the candidature and the performance of these candidates passing with a grade six or better in six subjects for the past five years.”
Zimsec’s Grade Seven examinations have been seeing ever more children writing. The number of candidates rose from 327 599 in 2020 to 387 429 this year while the pass rate improved from 37,11 percent in 2020 to 49,01 percent this year.
The online platform e-map, Prof Mapfumo said, was now fully functional with the Grade Seven results available on the portal and from Monday secondary school heads could start doing their selections for Form One enrolment.
