The West African Examinations Council (WAEC) has confirmed that candidates from 33 selected Senior High Schools (SHSs) in the country will be examined with the new second-cycle school curriculum in this year’s May-June West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) for School Candidates.

It said the examination would be based on what was termed the “21st Century Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Questions”, which were more practical than the traditional questions.

The Head of Public Affairs of WAEC, John Kapi, who made this known to the Daily Graphic, said the initiative would be rolled out eventually in all SHSs across the country.

He said the 33 schools were specifically selected to pilot the programme, after which the remaining 987 SHSs would be gradually brought on board.

He expressed the hope that by 2027, all 1,020 SHSs in the country would be rolled onto the new programme.

“These people are not any special kind of students. It’s just that they are doing the new curriculum and that curriculum is career-driven. So whatever it is that you are studying right now is leading you towards a certain career path.

“So you can have those who are into medical sciences, so at every stage you know what you are doing and also we have those who are into engineering,” he said.  

Mr Kapi said the candidates were not new, and that the only difference was that they would be writing a different set of questions under the new curriculum under separate supervision. 

“So, you could have people doing engineering science. Now we have introduced some new subjects, so you can have Spanish,” he said.  

Meanwhile, Daily Graphic’s checks revealed that the 33 institutions included the SHSs offering the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) programme.

They include the Bosomtwe Girls STEM SHS and Abomosu STEM SHS.

A total of 473,658 final-year senior high school (SHS) students from Ghana will join their counterparts from the four other West African member countries to sit for the 2026 May-June WASSCE-SC.

This follows the country’s return to the international examination this year after five years of writing the Ghana Only Version, which was occasioned by the COVID-19 outbreak.

This year’s candidature comprised 248,461 males and 225,197 females from 1,020 participating public and private second-cycle schools.

That represents a 2.58 per cent increase over last year’s figure of 461,736.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced member countries of the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) to shift the WASSCE-SC from May-June to July 20 to September 5, 2020, while in 2021, the examination was administered from August 16 to October 8.

After 2021, all the other member countries of WAEC, including Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone and The Gambia, made efforts to streamline their academic calendars to return to the May-June calendar.

However, following five years of writing the Ghana Only Version of the WASSCE-SC, Ghanaian candidates will join their counterparts in the other WAEC member countries for this year’s examination, which begins with practicals or project work this month.