So bad has the racial imbalance become that reports suggest Indian students are offering to pay university officials to register them as coloured as they become desperate to get into the UKZN’s medical school.

Reports by the SA Sunday Times and MyBroadband.co.za says UKZN receives 8,300 applicants for 250 places at its medical school each year, with a racially based admissions policy stating that 69% of successful applicants need to be black, 19% coloured, 9% Indian, 2% white and 1% ‘other’.

It takes little knowledge of statistics and math to realise that if only the top-performing students from each race group gets admitted, the level of results for each race will be different.

Earlier the The Sunday Tribune reported that in 2015 and 2016, Indian students needed a matric average of 90.83% to get into the medical school. For white students it was much higher. If their marks were below the very best, they were not admitted. This is despite students from other race groups having lower matric marks.

The ‘average’ minimum requirements set by UKZN for a MBChB (Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery, which you need to qualify as a medical doctor) is matric results of 65%, with at least 60% in Maths, Physical Science, Life Sciences, and English.

As for some other South Africa universities, the University of the Witwatersrand says they do not allocate places to race groups because they have an alternative admission policy. It states that 40% of places are offered to top-performing students, 20% are offered to top-performing students from rural areas, 20% are offered to top-performing learners from quintile 1 and 2 schools (the “poorest” government schools) and 20% are offered to high-achieving African and coloured learners.

The University of the Free State does not use racial quotas for medicine, but makes efforts to accommodate candidates from a disadvantaged academic background.

The University of Cape Town told MyBroadband.co.za it incorporated race as “one of several factors to be considered in assessing an applicant’s historic disadvantage”.