The Grade 12 NSC examinations were one of the instruments for measuring how government was doing in discharging its responsibility of improving the quality of education. Cause for concern was the gradual decline of the pass rate in the past three years. Dr Sishi talked of the integrity of the national examinations and mentioned that the reasons for the standardisation of results were to ensure that learners were not duly/unduly advantaged by the fluctuation of results, that a consistent quality is produced to mitigate the fluctuation of learners' performance as a result of factors other than the learners' performance.