Africa Education Watch (EduWatch) has urged stakeholders to shift the debate over the latest WASSCE results away from the grading system and towards improving student performance.

The call follows the release of the latest BECE and West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) results, which have raised concerns about poor student performance.

Executive Director of EduWatch, Kofi Asare, said the grading system should not become the main focus of the conversation.

He explained that the use of stanine norms means some students will naturally fall at the lower end of the grading curve.

“Obviously, since you have stanine, you always have a certain number scoring 4%, scoring nine. And so the stanine norm, 4% are likely to get nine.”

He said the distribution could also mean that students who perform exceptionally well in one subject may not necessarily be the same students who perform equally well in another.

“And so if you have 4% getting nine in maths, and that 4% are not the same as those getting nine in English, then you’re likely to have 8% statistically.”

According to him, the size of the candidate population means that even a small percentage can translate into a significant number of students.

“So then you’re still getting close to 50k from this number; we are talking about 619k.”

He, however, stressed that the debate should not become overly focused on grading.

“So, it’s expected that those at the lower end of the bell curve will always not meet that mark.”

“But I don’t want us to overly concentrate on the grading system as the cause because I think that conversations should rather be about how to improve performance.”

Mr Asare said Ghana must confront the larger question of why students can spend years in basic education and still leave school without meeting the required standard.

He argued that failure at the end of basic education should not be treated as the student's sole responsibility.

“Ensuring that no one goes through basic school for 9 years, excluding KG, so 11 years, and then fails ever.”

“I mean we should ask ourselves that question: Why should someone go through basic education for 11 years and come out with what we call a fail?”

He said poor outcomes should trigger a system-wide examination of the factors affecting education.

“That failure is not the student’s alone failing. It’s all of us failing, including the government, the teachers, the GES, the parents, us stakeholders, and also the students.”

Mr Asare called for broader discussions that can produce practical interventions to improve learning outcomes.

“So those questions normally should be asked broadly so that we are able to get a necessary system-wide response, you know, to improve on the performance of those we shepherd through school from Kindergarten 1 all the way to Junior High School 3.”