11/12/2025
Exam‑marking breach rattles 2025 matric process, DBE calls urgent briefing
The Department of Basic Education (DBE) has confirmed a breach during the marking of this year’s National Senior Certificate (NSC) exams, identified via its internal monitoring systems.
Siviwe Gwarube, Minister of Basic Education, is scheduled to brief the media today, Thursday (11 December) when she is expected to outline the interventions and measures the DBE will deploy to safeguard the integrity and credibility of the 2025 NSC results.
This year’s matric class is the largest ever, over 900 000 candidates registered across the country. The marking operation alone involves roughly 185 marking centres and more than 40 000 officials tasked with processing the exam scripts.
The DBE has previously emphasised the security measures in place, GPS‑tracking of delivery trucks for exam papers, tamper‑proof paper for key subjects, and electronic moderation and verification during marking. Yet the breach indicates that even with those safeguards, vulnerabilities remain.
South Africa’s matric system has been under scrutiny for several years. In 2020, the leak of Mathematics Paper 2 and Physical Sciences led to a planned rewrite only for it to be overturned by the Gauteng High Court.
In 2022, a cheating ring involving more than 370 pupils in Mpumalanga was uncovered. Later, though there was no paper leak in 2024, matric results were reportedly sold online before their official release allegedly by a 21‑year-old from Hillcrest. (The sale of early access to results prompted an investigation.)
Since then, the department has ramped up exam security and oversight, yet the recurring breaches and leaks have continued to cast doubt on the system’s reliability.
With thousands of candidates waiting for the 2025 results, this breach threatens to undermine public confidence in the NSC certification. Rewrite or, at the very least, a close review and possible invalidation of compromised scripts may become