Make Chief Examiners’ report available yearly
An educational consultant, Mr Grant Bulmuo, has challenged the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) to ensure that the Chief Examiners’ report is available on yearly basis.
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He said that would help teachers identify mistakes made in the previous year to enable them to correct those mistakes and prevent repetitions by the next batch of candidates.
Training workshop
Mr Bulmuo threw the challenge in an interview after he had addressed over 150 teachers and headteachers at a one-day training workshop to equip them to effectively impart knowledge to their children.
The workshop, dubbed; “Bridging the gap in education through training,” was organised by the Neogenics Education an educational NGO.
The teachers were drawn from the Greater Accra, Ashanti, Volta, Central and Eastern regions.
Timely and specific
Mr Bulmuo, an educationalist who has taught at various levels in the United Kingdom (UK) and is now an educational consultant, disclosed that “The Chief Examiners’ report needs to be school and subject specific.”
He expressed concern that the situation where WAEC made available the Chief Examiners’ comment two or three years after the examination was not helpful to both the teacher and the students.
In addition, he said, the current state, where the Chief Examiner’s report was general did not point out exactly, which school’s candidates made certain specific mistakes.
“The Chief Examiners’ report must be peculiar to the school, and the time it is issued must be relevant. It must be time bound for the teachers to identify what really cause students to fail,” he stressed.
Teacher training
Touching on the performance of students who sit the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE), Mr Bulmuo attributed the poor performance of pupils, particularly those from public schools, to the kind of training given to the teachers.
“We must begin to look at how we produce our teachers. We must have a teacher training standard which every teacher must be subjected to, with review every year and effective monitoring and evaluation,” he said.