The Minister of Education, Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, says steps are being taken to eliminate cheating in examination in the country, despite the number of cases recorded in the last West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (WASSCE).
He said the Ministry of Education in collaboration with the West Africa Examination Council (WAEC) had introduced a number of measures, including “serialisation and randomisation” of examination questions and these had contributed to eliminating examination question leakages in the country.
Briefing the media on the state of education in Accra yesterday, Dr Adutwum said “we have worked with WAEC to introduce what is called serialisation or randomisation of questions. The first, three years, different regions had different randomised questions that ended leakages.”
He noted that in addition to serialising the questions for Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE), the last two years had also presented opportunity for the same to be done at different examination centres.
“This has ended the market for leakage of examination questions and WAEC has done a good job,” he said.
Dr Adutwum said it was unfortunate that the cancelation of examination results would be used as a basis to condemn the entire performance of students.
“There have been some allegations that there was so much cancelation of results and it is no wonder that our students did well. To begin with, it is as simple as this… In 2014, 82 per cent results of one or more subjects were canceled by WAEC and in 2023, 81 per cent of one or more subjects were canceled so the situation is not worse than it used to be,” he emphasised.
The minister noted that even though he didn’t want to equalise in terms of malpractices, there was the need to set the records straight.
“Those of you in the media are fully aware that there used to be examination leakages with BECE many years ago, but the last three years there had been no leakages. How did it happen that there are no leakages, he queried?”
Dr Adutwum said his outfit was on a journey and questions for WASSCE would also be either serialised or randomised to make sure that even in the examination room students were unable to copy.
“This cheating business we know how to stop it and we as a government are committed to ending it and WAEC will also end it so that this issue will be a thing of the past,” he said.
Touching on recent confusion on the number of subjects to be examinable at the BECE, he said the number of subjects remained unchanged despite the change in curriculum.
He therefore, asked the general public and all stakeholders to disregard the speculations that the number of subjects for this year’s examination had been reduced.
Dr Adutwum said the government’s transformation agenda in the education sector was on course and the numerous developmental projects were all geared towards that.
BY CLIFF EKUFUL
