A COMPARISON OF THE ANALYTICAL HIERARCHY PROCESS AND SUBJECT PAIRS ANALYSIS WHEN RANKING SUBJECT DIFFICULTY

Abstract

This paper describes the application of the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Subject Pairs Analysis (SPA) for evaluating subjects’ difficulty. The study assesses the difficulty of National Senior Certificate (NSC) subjects for the Grade 12 exit examination and aimed at providing information on the actual performance of learners in different subjects. The study further intended to determine subjects which were consistently more difficult relative to other subjects. The study used data provided by the Department of Basic Education (DBE) on learner performance in the Grade 12 NSC examinations during the 2014 to 2018 academic years. The study was quantitative in nature and used R and SAS software for the statistical analysis. Two techniques, namely AHP and SPA were compared in the analysis of data to identify subjects that were consistently difficult across the years.