In recent times, WAEC has been in the bad books of private schools at the Basic and Secondary levels and has been blamed for poor student performance at the BECE and WASSCE resulting from the alleged tough marking of scripts of private school candidates.
Private schools to set up new exams council: Reads for the decision
Private schools have continuously cited WAEC’s discrimination against private school students in BECE.
To deal with the mistrust and the alleged maltreatment of its candidates, a group calling itself the Private Education Coalition (PEC) has initiated moves to withdraw private school candidates from the WAEC-administered BECE.
This it believes will introduce competition and tame the monopoly of WAEC when it comes to national and international assessment of candidates.
The decision to start a WAEC competitor in the testing section of education was fuelled by the probe into the marking of the 2021 BECE scripts of private school candidates by WAEC examiners.
A statement emanating from PEC indicated that
“If the Government’s priority is on public schools, then the private sector ought to be able to be self-governing (including setting up its own examinations board) and moving students into private Senior High Schools,”
While granting Citi FM/TV an interview on the matter, Enoch Gyetuah, who is the Director of Ghana National Council of Private Schools, emphatically stated that the PEC believes WAEC deliberately marked down scripts of private schools’ BECE candidates. This, according to him, helped public JHS candidates to obtain better results than their colleagues in private schools.
WAEC has however denied the allegation and stated that it has over 10,000 examiners across the country, and it was just impossible for it to reach out to all these examiners and direct them to mark scripts of private school candidates differently.
“Most of the private school students have been marked down, and we are calling for re-marking and even calling for an independent body to go into that. There’s even discrimination in the aspect of the school placement,” he told Citi.
But, the management of the not-for-profit-making organization (WAEC) reacting to the claim by Mr. Enoch Kwasi Gyetuah has said the allegations that private schools’ BECE scripts were marked down are baseless and false.
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The PEC is yet to officially unveil its private examination council, and the entire education sector stakeholders are looking closely at the next move by the private schools and how such an exam council will be co-opted into the national assessment sector in the education section of the country.