Johannesburg — AN OVERALL 37% drop in first-year students' June mathematics pass rate at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) echoes the trend at the universities of Pretoria, Stellenbosch.

Cape Town, KwaZulu-Natal, the North West and Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, says Dr Belinda Huntley of Wits's mathematics department.

This year's first-year students were different to those from previous years because the 2008 matric mathematics pass rate was "exceptionally high" and many more matriculants qualified for university. They were also the first to have been taught according to outcomes-based education principles throughout their school career and they were the first group for whom a mathematics subject was compulsory to matric, Huntley said during a panel discussion at Wits on Wednesday.

While it was "absolutely normal" for students to experience a drop between their final matric mark and their university marks, this year's drop was "drastic" and the "inflated matric results" had created unjustified expectations, in the students and in the universities, Huntley said.

Much of the mathematics the students were missing are in the optional Advanced Mathematics Programme, commonly called Maths Paper 3, which is not taught in all schools. The panel discussion was called to explore whether the topics dealt with in the optional examination should be brought back into the general mathematics curriculum.

Feedback from lecturers in the pure sciences and particularly engineering was that the optional topics -- Euclidean geometry, recursive sequences, descriptive statistics and interpretation, probability and bivariate data -- should be part of the general mathematics curriculum, Huntley said.

The issue required "widespread consultation", said Independent Examination Board assessment specialist Graham Evans, but he believed Maths Paper 3 should be reintroduced into the curriculum.

"It was part of the original National Curriculum Statement (NCS), so it was thought at the time ( early 1990s) that the topics were essential ... It's not additional or advanced work, it is a subtraction from the original curriculum," he said.

Education department deputy director-general of further education and training Penny Vinjevold said it was decided to excise the Maths Paper 3 topics from the NCS after questions were raised about SA's readiness to move from 50% to 60% of matriculants studying mathematics to making mathematics or mathematics literacy compulsory.

Mathematics literacy focuses on the areas in real life where mathematics is needed.

The original idea to return the topics to the curriculum at the end of this year was scrapped when the department realised it had not been able to accomplish the teacher training it had wanted to get done. There was also no clarity from universities what should be returned to the curriculum -- each discipline, such as engineering or pure science, wanted an emphasis on different things, she said.

A review would be conducted next year, Vinjevold said.

First-year students who had passed Maths Paper 3 last year said they had benefited from it, said high school mathematics teacher Lerato Mathenjwa. She had tracked down some of her top 2008 pupils, now studying engineering and actuarial science at Wits and the University of Cape Town.

Mathenjwa pointed to a problem also highlighted by Evans -- because Maths Paper 3 is optional it is difficult to persuade matriculants to study the subject.

"What makes the paper hard to prepare for is the fact that the paper is optional and does not determine if a candidate will pass or not," said one of Mathenjwa's pupils, now studying mechanical engineering at Wits.

First-year students in study programmes that required mathematics and who had not done Maths Paper 3 were left to "just swim through university maths on (their) own", said Mathenjwa.