BECE will not be cancelled — GES
The Ghana Education Service (GES) has said the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) will not be cancelled with the move from the objective-based curriculum to the standard-based one.
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It, therefore, debunked rumours being circulated that the BECE has been cancelled.
“Please do not communicate that we are no more writing BECE.
The BECE is not cancelled, we are writing and even those who are in junior high school (JHS) 2 will also write ," the Director-General of the GES, Dr Eric Nkansah, said in response to a comment from a member of the audience at a forum organised by the West African Examinations Council on the BECE Grading System in Accra last Thursday.
That member of the audience had suggested that the BECE would be cancelled.
In January this year, the GES said it had come to its attention that some heads of public basic schools had made some students, who were in JHS 2 last academic year, and were supposed to progress to JHS 3 this academic year, to repeat.
The management of GES, it said, took serious exception to the practice due to the fact that the current JHS three students were the last batch of the objective-based curriculum candidates who would write the final BECE under the said syllabus this year.
It said students who were promoted to JHS 2 this year were, therefore, going to be the first batch of candidates who would write BECE in 2024 using the new standard-based curriculum.
As a result, a statement to that effect said, all last year’s JHS 2 students should progress to JHS 3 in order not to disadvantage any objective-based curriculum student in the BECE.
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The Head of National Office of WAEC, Wendy Enyonam Addy-Lamptey, urged the public to shed off any old ideas and thoughts that they might have about the BECE grading system.
She said the issue of the performance of candidates at the BECE had become very topical.
Mrs Addy-Lamptey said the discussion on the fundamentals of the BECE Grading System was an attempt by the council to bring further clarity on the BECE grading system to help stakeholders appreciate the performance of candidates much better and also to create mutual understanding between the council and its numerous publics.
That, she said, was also one of the ways to engage their stakeholders which was one of the pillars of WAEC’s Five-Year Strategic Plan for 2023-2027 launched a few months ago.
“Let me use this opportunity to state that a final marking scheme is developed for each subject at the end of the Preliminary Coordination Meetings and all the examiners use this marking scheme to mark the scripts of all candidates for that subject,” she stated.
Statements
“Indeed such untrue statements about marking schemes and grading mislead members of the public and create unnecessary anxiety among school authorities, candidates and their parents,” she said.
In a presentation, a former Head of the Test Administration Division of WAEC, Felix Akuffo-Badoo, said there was a need to revisit the BECE grading system for reimplementation.
Additionally, he recommended that training programmes be organised for teachers on continuous Assessment Scores.
