PS, MoBSE
(Photo: The Standard newspaper)
By Buba Gagigo
The Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education (MoBSE), Louis Moses Mendy has blamed Covid-19 for the poor performance of students at this year’s WASSCE.
“Let me remind the audience that this cohort of students were those that were in grade 10 When the COVID hit, and they had 265 contact hours lost- meaning almost two terms of the entire academic year for these students was interrupted by COVID. When the schools resumed, what happened to help them were remedial classes, and I am sure you will all agree that the remedial classes cannot be as effective as normal classes.
“What would have happened in the normal operational environment would be the normal classes will exist and the remedial will supplement that so but here we have in the remedial as the main source of helping the students so it is important that people put that in perspective,” PS Mendy told GRTS on Friday.
The Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education (MoBSE) PS called this year’s performance ‘impressive’, considering the departure point of the students that sat for the exams.
“You (interviewer) asked for the analysis because if you see that this is the new trend, it’s unfortunate that perhaps those doing the analysis have not based it on any baseline. Let me just say that what we have seen this year is impressive, knowing where the students that sat to these exams came from.
“By way of analysis in 2017, we registered 21.7% of the total students that sat to do the exams, completely having zero, meaning all the subjects they did not score anything on. We have now been able to reduce that to 6%. So I don’t know where the total failure is coming from. If you look at that against last year to this year, we had 9.4% of the students that registered for WAEC with total failure and this year we have 6%. So there is still a difference of at least 3.4% So it is not accurate to say that,” he concluded.
The West African Senior Secondary School Certificate examination results 2022 are recently released with just 605 students securing five credits and above including Maths and English language from the 15, 360 registered candidates, according to a statement from the examination council.
Meaning, only 605 students (316 boys and 289 girls) got University entry requirements, leaving 14, 755 without.
The dismal outcome has sparked public outcry with increased calls for much needed changes to the national curriculum, teaching methods and student guidance. But others blamed
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education said it is analysing the results, after which it would make an official statement.
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