Johannesburg — THE University of Johannesburg's (UJ's) goal of raising its throughput rate from 76% to 78% next year would be an "uphill challenge" because of the change in students that has come from the new curriculum, vice-chancellor Ihron Rensburg said this week.

Last year was the first in which matriculants achieved their matric certificates under the new outcomes-based curriculum, known as the National Curriculum Statement. Earlier this year, Higher Education SA's former president, Prof Theuns Eloff, warned Parliament the matric class of 2008 was less prepared for higher education than their seniors.

Rensburg said UJ would "pull back" by just less than 2000 the number of students it enrolled for next year so that enrolment settled at about 48000. There had been a period of growth in enrolment after an initial drop off to 41800 after UJ was formed in December 2005 by the merger of the Rand Afrikaans University (RAU) and Technikon Witwatersrand, and the incorporation into the old RAU of some of the Vista University campuses.

UJ's executive director of academic support, Prof Elizabeth de Kadt , said the class of 2008 showed a clear weakness in mathematics, which had made teaching mathematics-driven programmes a problem. Research by the University of the Witwatersrand's (Wits) mathematics department, released at midyear, showed that an overall 37% drop in first-year students' June mathematics pass rate at Wits echoed the trend at the universities of Pretoria, Stellenbosch, Cape Town, KwaZulu-Natal, the North West and Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University.

Universities had to contend with more first-years enrolling for mathematics- driven programmes after last year's matric mathematics pass rate was far higher than that of previous years, meaning many more matriculants qualified for university and for mathematics-driven courses, the Wits researchers said.

They were also the first to have been taught according to outcomes-based principles throughout their school career and the first group for whom a mathematics subject was compulsory to matric. While there were gaps, last year's matriculants were better able to learn in groups, were willing to ask questions and wrestle with problems, and some had learnt to read at a high level, said De Kadt.

This year and in coming years, UJ would test its students using Higher Education SA's national benchmarking test, aimed at helping higher education institutions make sense of the National Curriculum Statement by ascertaining prospective students' proficiency in language and mathematics, and general academic skills, De Kadt said.