Story: Mary Ankrah
A suggestion has been made to the Ghana Education Service (GES) to abolish the continuous assessment of junior high school pupils in the determination of their results of the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE).
This is because some schools cook the figures in order to give advantage to their candidates.
The assessment is a permanent record of a child’s school performance from their first day of school, containing schools attended, address, the test scores as they progresses through school, teachers’ comments about their performance in the classroom, absenteeism and tardiness. Each year, more information is added to the records.
Mr William Amenyawu, a teacher, who made the suggestion in Accra yesterday, said the performance of the pupils should be based on their final examination performance.
In an interview with the Daily Graphic, he said pupils who were given fictitious cumulative results were unable to perform well at the senior high school level.
He argued that the practice was prevalent because the GES did not have a strong system to monitor and check the assessments that were submitted by the schools.
This, he said, gave some of the schools the opportunity to cook results for their students in order to score higher marks, ostensibly to raise their image and attract more pupils to their schools.
Mr Amenyawu, who said he recently resigned from a school in the Central Region, accused the school authorities of constantly manufacturing cumulative results for their pupils.
He said on many occasions pupils who left one school for the other failed to take along their assessments and the authorities in their new schools rather manufactured fictitious ones for them instead of insisting on their previous records.
Mr Amenyawu indicated that some parents insisted on promoting their children even when the children had not reached their final stage to write the BECE.
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