The Minister of Education, Matthew Opoku Prempeh, has advised that the Basic Education Certificate Examination candidates whose results were cancelled by the West African Examination Council (WAEC) should rewrite the examination in February next year.
He made this statement during the 16th sitting of the third meeting of Parliament on October 27, 2017
“The 2017 BECE results for the 350 candidates who sat for the examination in the Zabzugu Senior High School centre were cancelled due to their involvement in mass cheating collusion in that examination. It is therefore advised that the affected candidates register and resit for the examination as private candidates in February 2018, if the examination council so permits”, he explained.
The Member of Parliament for Zabzugu constituency, Alhassan Umar, argued that the West African Examination Council was inconsiderate in ‘punishing’ all 350 students since not all of them sat in the same examination hall.
According to him, the affected students sat in different classrooms to write the examinations, thus there was no need to conclude that all 350 candidates cheated in the examination.
In response to that, Mr. Opoku Prempeh explained that the results of such students have been released and those students have been admitted into their respective schools.
WAEC withheld 1,298 subject results of some candidates who sat for the examination on suspicion that they may have engaged in examination malpractices. Out of the 1,298 students, 350 were students from the Zabzugu constituency.
