Ghana's examination malpractice crisis

A problem that refuses to go away

For about five years, I have become increasingly concerned about the scale and normalization of examination malpractice at the BECE and WASSCE levels in Ghana.

The 2025 JoyNews documentary, Dark World of BECE, exposed disturbing practices allegedly involving teachers, school authorities, invigilators and examination officials. Yet, surprisingly, little seems to have changed.

Last week, I listened to Kofi Asare of Africa Education Watch discuss the problem again on Citi FM. What worries me is that cheating appears to have become so widespread and organized to the extent that it threatens the integrity of the entire assessment system.

A private school’s dilemma

I recently had a conversation with a friend who owns a private school. His school has for years refused to participate in examination malpractice.

But now parents are increasingly pressuring the school to “do what the other schools are doing.”

Their complaint is painfully understandable: their children study hard and write honestly but must compete against candidates from schools where organized cheating allegedly produces extraordinarily high scores.

To these parents, their children are “suffering” because of the school’s integrity.

How stanine grading turns cheating into a zero-sum game

There is a disturbing dimension of the problem.

The BECE uses the Stanine grading system where the top 4% of candidates receive Grade 1 and the next 7% Grade 2. Grades therefore depend partly on where a candidate falls within the national distribution, not simply on the absolute mark obtained.

Now consider a deliberately simplified hypothetical example.

Suppose 10% of BECE candidates benefit from organized cheating and consequently obtain exceptionally high marks.

Since only 11% of all candidates can occupy Grades 1 and 2, those cheating candidates could potentially occupy almost the entire top two grade categories.

An honest candidate scoring, say, 80% could therefore conceivably be pushed below Grade 2, not because 80% is poor performance, but because cheating had distorted the national distribution.

The actual effect would, of course, depend on the distribution of scores and the scale and effectiveness of malpractice.

But the principle is important: under a relative grading system, cheating does not benefit only the cheat; it can directly disadvantage the honest candidate.

THE CORE PROBLEM

Under a relative grading system, cheating does not benefit only the cheat; it can directly disadvantage the honest candidate.

How corruption becomes systemic and what we should do

That creates a dangerous incentive.

Schools that maintain integrity may appear to perform worse. Parents then pressure them to join the cheating schools.

As more schools succumb, the incentive for the remaining honest schools to resist becomes weaker.

This is how corruption becomes systemic.

We therefore need to do more than the tiny fraction of candidates whose results are often withheld. We need to consider more stringent responses.

The most important is a society that has conscience.

We also need much stronger sanctions for adults and institutions that organize examination malpractice.

Perhaps systematic use of statistical tools and AI could help flag suspicious school-level performance patterns for investigation.

Importantly, we need a serious examination of whether norm-referenced grading remains appropriate when the integrity of the underlying score distribution cannot be guaranteed.

We cannot ask children to value honesty while maintaining a system in which dishonesty may improve not only the cheat’s outcome, but worsen the honest child’s outcome.