My daughter is reading a novel set in South Africa. The main character is told by his teacher is expecting a first-class matric from…and he has to sit for his matric, etc. Is this like a college board exam or thesis? Perhaps it comes from “matriculate”? The American English dictionary has no record of this word (i.e., M-W.com does not even suggest it is in their unabridged listing.)
I assume it is a British colloquial word?
It comes from matriculate. I went to high school in South Africa and the term is generally used to refer to your last (Grade 12) year of high school. “Matriculate” pretty much is synonymous with graduating from high school. I don’t think I ever used the phrase “sit for a matric” but it has only one possible meaning: the end of year exams that is a big part of your graduating transcript (and is a very big deal for university eligibility).
When I finished high school in 1997 the grades were named Sub A, Sub B, Standard 1 though 9 and Matric. I think soon after they renamed it Grades 1 through 11 and Matric.
I think you misspelled “South African”.
Though I understand the word “matriculate”, I am personally not familiar with the shortened term, and in my experience of our schooling system we don’t use either.
It was quite common here through until the 1970s, and hasn’t completely disappeared: South Australian matriculation program
To ‘matriculate’ meant to gain sufficiently good results on one’s final school exams to gain a place at university. The final exams themselves were also often referred to by the term ‘matric’
Here’s the full story:
At the end of the twelfth grade (which is the highest grade) in South African high schools, students write the “Senior Certificate” examinations, which are set by the provincial Departments of Education. (Actually, they may be set by the national DoE now.) To receive the Senior Certificate - i.e., to graduate from high school - a student must achieve certain minimum results. However, a plain Senior Certificate is not sufficient for students who want to go to university. By law, to register for a bachelor’s degree at a South African university a student must have a Senior Certificate “with matriculation endorsement”, which requires higher results than a plain SC. (Students from other countries can get a “matriculation exemption” which basically indicates that their school-leaving results are at least equivalent.)
“Matric” is, of course, a shortening of “matriculation”. For some reason it has come to be associated with the final year of high school in general. So it has the following uses:
[ul]
[li]“Matric” or “Matric year” meaning Grade 12.[/li][li]“a matric” meaning a student in Grade 12.[/li][li]“matric exams” meaning the Senior Certificate exams; hence “sitting for your matric” means writing the SC exams.[/li][li]“a first-class matric” meaning good results on the SC exams (technically, a “Senior Certificate with endorsement with distinction”).[/li][li]the “matric dance” is what would be called a “prom” in the US[/li][li]etc. etc.[/li][/ul]
The matric exams are a very big deal, because matric results (which are 75% from the exams and 25% from other work done during grades 11 and 12) are the only thing that universities will look at for admissions. They’ll look at earlier results from high school to offer early admission, but it’s still conditional on the final results.
(My source: I graduated from high school in Cape Town in 2004.)
" Matric " was widely used for 12th grade , in a former British colony,India .
Ditto Pakistan. It is the lowest education qualification, taken at 16.
Not at the level of Secondary education, but Matriculation has a meaning at some UK Universities (including the one that’s not too far from your own back yard, where it is a ceremony of acceptance as a lifelong member of the incoming student’s College and University).
Matriculation used to be used for registering at university in the UK (see the wiki article on the subject) but I am pretty sure my Dad (Glasgow High School in the 1930s) has used it in the sense of his school finals before going on to medical school.
Ooops! Semi simu-post. Must preview before posting…
When I went to college in Scotland in the 70s, every student was issued with a ‘matric’ card as part of the registration process.
It acted as a photo ID card and you had to produce it to get into the Student Unions, etc. They were accepted nationwide, not just by the issuing college/university.
If you weren’t a student and thus didn’t have one and you wanted to get into the Union for a disco or a gig, you often had to lurk outside asking random students who did have one, to sign you in…
You don’t tell us when the novel is set.
Matriculation was, at one time, a set of examinations required shortly before (or after) going up to Oxford or Cambridge, to test the new (or would-be) undergraduate’s academic ability in the days before nationally certified school-leaving examinations. The word is not much used here now.
When it is set doesn’t matter, as it refers to South Africa, and thus ctnguy’s explanation is correct for any time up to and including the present. One difference between the matric dance and prom, is that I gather that prom is not only for grade 12s, am I right? The matric dance is only for grade 12s and their partners; I guess the partners can come from different grades. I’m not sure of that since I went to a girls only high school, so our partners came from anywhere we could find them 
Here’s one more great South African cultural institution: the matric holiday. We have the most wonderful arrangement over here: the academic year coincides with the calendar year, and Christmas is in summer. So you get Christmas, and summer holidays, and you’ve finished exams and whatever, and in the case of matrics you’re never going to school again! So after matric, that holiday is the time for everyone to cut loose in a big way, packs of kids going on road trips down to the coast to drink vast amounts (drinking age is 18 here - as is driving age!) and party and hook up and make trouble. I speak from experience.
Unfortunately, no one can be told what The Matric is. You have to see it for yourself.
Sorry
It’s not that hard to do either. Just use the red ruler, not the blue one.
When I left school, 21 years ago, Irish universities each had an entrance exam called (informally) the matric (pronounced m’trick - stress on the second syllable). Already at that time, few people sat the exam, because the state end-of-school exam (the Leaving Cert) served as a single entrance qualification to all the universities. Nonetheless, I sat both the Leaving Cert and the NUI matric, by way of hedging my bets.
I don’t know if any of the universities still have a matric.
I now know more about Matric than I did before. In the sixties and before you could get a Matric through gaining a certain mark in the Senior Certificate or taking the exams set by the Joint Matriculation Board.
A First Class was an average of 60% or more, also called a ‘C’.
With this you could get into Medical School, for example.
Now everyone gets an ‘A’.
Hardly anyone got a ‘B’ average, and I never met anyone with an’A’ average, although I expect there were some. Now it’s rife.
I don’t get the OP. Why ask Brits about a South African word? It’s like asking “Americans, pleased explain the Australian term ‘fair dinkum’”.
Well, South African English is derived from British English. It’s not unreasonable for an American (I presume the OP is American?) who reads an unfamiliar word in SA English (at least a word that’s not obviously from Afrikaans or from an indigenous language) to assume that it comes from British English. Not a wrong assumption in this case, it would seem, as apparently the word is used with a similar meaning in some other Commonwealth countries.