The bar has been set as low as 30% in some subjects, more than half of the students who start school don't finish, and independent international studies have placed us stone last in the all-important subjects of maths and science.
But perhaps the most damning indictment, and a true indication of just how the certificate is regarded, is that more and more universities require students who have passed with exemption to write their own National Benchmarking Tests as a prerequisite for acceptance.
This must set even more alarm bells ringing, if that's possible, for it speaks of a future in which the matric certificate will very soon not be worth the paper it's written on.
The Education Department can bloat the pass mark all it likes but, if no one trusts it, what's the point?
The real casualty here is, of course, "the truth".
By continuing to pretend that things are getting better, when they are not, they must inevitably get worse. If you don't look the ugly truth in the eye, and see how criminally messed-up our education system is, how can you begin to go about fixing it? The thinking seems to be that there isn't a problem, so long as we can pretend that there isn't one.
In the meantime, we'll hear all about how lowering the pass rate is necessary because failure is bad for student self-esteem, though, in truth, students seem to be the last item on anyone's agenda.
What's really going on here is a whole lot of barely disguised face-saving in line with an emerging culture of hiding from the truth because it happens to be embarrassing.
Let's not ask ourselves why people are booing: we don't want to know. Let's instead have a witch-hunt and identify the people who are embarrassing us.
Forget the truth - where's my face?
http://www.timeslive.co.za/thetimes/2014/01/06/let-s-face-the-truth-and-stop-tricking-up-the-matric-results