2022 WASSCE: Leakages did not influence current results

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Education, Mr. Kwasi Kwarteng, has stated that leakages of the West Africa Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (WASSCE) papers did not influence the current results of the 2022 WASSCE.

This comes after the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, described the results of the 2022 batch of students who wrote the WASSCE as the best in the last eight years.

According to him, “six (6) years on following the implementation of the Free Senior High School policy, which has guaranteed a minimum of Senior High School education for 1.7 million Ghanaian children, the highest such enrolment in our history, I can state, without equivocation, that I am very proud of the policy and of its results thus far.”

Delivering an address at the 70th Anniversary Celebration of Opoku Ware Senior High School, on Saturday, 3rd December 2022, the President noted that the 2022 WASSCE results of the third batch of the “Akufo-Addo graduates” shows 60.39% of students recording A1-C6 in English, as opposed to 51.6% in 2016.”

In Integrated Science, he noted that 62.45% recorded A1-C6 in Integrated Science in 2022, as opposed to 48.35% in 2016, with the 2022 result being a slight regression from the 2021 pass rate of 65.70%.

President Akufo-Addo added that 61.39% of students recorded A1-C6 in Mathematics, as compared to 33.12% in 2016; and 71.51% recorded A1-C6 in Social Studies, as compared to 54.55% in 2016.

“Lest we forget, the 2021 batch of students, who also obtained very commendable results, were the pioneers of the double track system, which elicited a lot of vilification and unfounded criticism on its introduction,” he said.

Speaking on Atinka TV’s morning show, Ghana Nie with Ekourba Gyasi Simpremu, Mr Kwasi Kwarteng observed that some persons were attributing the success of the 2022 WASSCE to leakages.

He said that as a human institution, it was possible that there would be leakages, but they could not influence the results because examiners put in place certain mechanisms to regulate leakages, malpractice, and others.

According to him, some of these mechanisms were serialisation where there were different questions at different centres.

Mr. Kwasi Kwarteng also said such comments were discouraging to the students because they studied well to achieve the results, aside from the teachers who also went all out to teach the students.

“This year, the Minister implemented something called question serialization, which began with the BECE and was later extended to the WASSCE. The serialization means that as they write the examination, each region has its own set of questions, as do the centers; even within the same center, someone’s question one could be someone’s question 20, making it difficult to engage in malpractice. Even the students were unaware that some of the questions were serialized and that WAEC was piloting it under our supervision. So, if you put all of these safeguards in place and students write and pass, it’s concerning when people attribute it to leaks,”

He said even though the serialisation was extended to WASSCE minimally, moving forward, it would be piloted massively.