Education think tank, Africa Education Watch, has called on the West African Examination Council (WAEC) to review the 2020 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) timetable.
The timetable indicates that two elective papers for business students — Financial Accounting and Principles of Cost Accounting, are scheduled to be written on the same day, September 5, 2020, with only an hour’s break.
The Africa Education Watch argues that the arrangement where two major elective subjects are written on the same day, for as long as 6 and half hours, with only one-hour break is “strenuous” and goes against “international standards of assessments at the secondary level.”
It said that previous attempts by the Ghana Association of Business Education Teachers to correct this “anomaly” have been unsuccessful.
“We may not be in normal times, but this certainly should not justify the imposition of such strenuous examination timetables, which are not in the best interest of the students to be examined. We are, therefore, calling on WAEC to review the timetable by postponing the said paper to either Sunday 6th or Monday 7th September 2020,” a statement from Africa Education Watch suggested.
The novel Coronavirus has forced some countries, including Nigeria, to call off the 2020 WASSCE, but the government of Ghana has insisted on holding it.
The Ghana government, recently, reopened schools to enable students to prepare for the exit examination.
With the rising calls on the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service to shut down Senior High Schools that have reported cases of COVID-19, some stakeholders have called for the exit examinations to be held online.
