The fundamental changes in the political and economic domains in South Africa in the late 1990s and recently in October 2015, affected the South African education community profoundly. In a context where applicants to higher education vary widely in terms of their prior educational, linguistic and socio-economic backgrounds, it becomes extremely important to assess the extent to which these applicants might be said to be ready to cope with academic reading and writing demands of higher education courses. In South Africa, a formal school leaving examination is an important source of gathering information about the entry level readiness of applicants to university. Typically, this examination is administered nationally by a ministry of basic education. Acceptable levels of achievement on this examination are ascertained and certificated such that higher education may use these as acceptable minima for entry into programmes of study. It has been assumed historically in this system that minimum levels of achievement imply that prerequisite knowledge and learning processes have been both taught and learned, and therefore applicants are “ready†to enter university. This was found to be incorrect especially when school leaving examination results were inflated. Therefore the National Benchmark Test (NBT) became even more crucial in a country like South Africa, where issues of equity of access, selection and redress remain a central challenge. The challenge is to identify academically talented students from educationally diverse backgrounds and provide support inthe classroom.This paper focuses on the effects on the South African higher education system post 1994; the transformation challenges, the educational reformand thereafter specific issues related to access and success in higher education.It also describes the theoretical basis for the development of tests ofacademic literacy that soften the role of prior learning in the assessment ofacademic readiness.Keywords:transformation, access, equity, university readiness, student success