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ABSTRACT
Entrance assessment and standardized testing is a feature of the South African higher education landscape, with many universities using assessment and testing as benchmarking, placement or, in some instances, gatekeeping exercises. Entrance assessment practices seek to inform universities about the capabilities of students. In this paper we examine current entrance assessment paradigms and practices through our frame of humanity, expectations, access and transformation (HEAT) embedded in a broader lens of postcolonialism. We claim that current practices do not lay a foundation for meeting the larger goals of higher education – they do not transform human relationships, ignore ways of being in the world, fail to sufficiently embed learning-centred teaching, nor promote metacognitive development, self-efficacy, resilience or lead to transformation. In so doing, we contribute a new way of thinking about the transformation of higher education today and the way in which diagnostic assessment could be re-visited to meet broader goals.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This is based on the typical numbers of first level students in the Social Sciences disciplines at the UKZN over the years 2012–2016. Data from DMI, a data collection tool used by the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
2 For example, at the Central University of Technology, the National Benchmarking Tests have been used as a baseline from which to develop innovative communities of practice that link the Department of Communication Sciences to the Department of Mathematics.
3 Our study does not explicitly deal with gender and gendered identities despite this having an important intersectionality with race and class (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall Citation2013). We do not analyse it here, not because it is unimportant, but because it deserves a separate paper of its own as the centre of analysis and not as an addendum. We acknowledge that different genders may experience different struggles at university through their own lenses and experiences. This topic deserves further exploration in its own right beyond the scope of this paper.
4 These innovations include alternatives to conventional testing such as interviews and portfolios including combinations of these.
5 See further the scholarly work published by Kwame Nkrumah (Citation1965), Amilcar Cabral (Citation2016) and Thomas Sankara during the transition to formal political independence on the African continent.
6 For further discussion of these contemporary debates today see De Sousa Santos, B. (Citation2014) Epistemologies of the South, London: Paradigm Publishers and Mbembe, A. (Citation2017) On the Postcolony, Berkeley: University of California Press.
7 The concept of ‘postcolonial’ is reference to colonial state and society since the beginnings of the colonial period as distinct from ‘post-colonial’ which refers to a distinct period in time when the states of the South received their formal political independence from colonial rule. Many postcolonial scholars reject the term post-colonial as it implies that colonialism ended when states received formal political independence or their self-government in a nationally constituted legislature, regardless of whether the dominant discourses were transformed or the new states had economic independence.
8 For heuristic purposes we define a traditional approach to teaching and learning as students being passive recipients of intellectual content through a lecture based method.
9 The South African National Qualifications Framework (NQF) is the system that records levels of learning achievement to ensure that the skills and knowledge that have been learned are recognized throughout the country. The NQF Act [No. 67 of 2008], facilitates an ascending ten level framework, where each level sets out a learning achievement. One of the mechanisms intended to help facilitate the NQF objectives are what are known as Level Descriptors which are indicative of the broad agreement on the benefits of promoting lifelong learning. They provide a ‘broad indication of the types of learning outcomes and assessment criteria that are appropriate to a qualification at that level (SAQA Citation2012) and informed by the NQF’s philosophical underpinning with is ‘applied competence’, an approach that articulates with outcomes-based theoretical framework adopted by South Africa. The three essential components of competence are: (i) foundational competence which is the academic or intellectual skills of knowledge, the ability to analyse, synthesize and evaluate for information processing and problem solving; (ii) practical competence which includes the operational context and (iii) reflexive competence as demonstrated by learner autonomy (RSA Citation2012).
10 Metacognition is the awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes which when developed may lead to higher cognitive skills and lifelong reflexive learning.
11 Where the National Senior Certificate (NSC) is the standardized tool of measurement.
12 The Fees Must Fall Campaign is a student-led protest movement originating in late 2015 on the University of the Witwatersrand campus and grew into a country-wide alliance of the major student organizations protesting against the increase in fees. The Campaign highlighted the gap between being admitted to South African higher education institutions and being able to remain and succeed.
13 The Bantu education system refers to the system of education that was implemented following the Bantu Education Act of 1953 [Act No.47 of 1953], later re-named the Black Education Act of 1953. The Act legalized and enforced racially segregated and unequal education for people defined by the Apartheid State as Native, European, Indian and Coloured and registered at birth under these apartheid prescribed categories under the Population Registration Act of 1950 [Act No.30 of 1950].