Education think tank, Africa Education Watch has mounted a spirited defence of its report, alleging massive leakages in the 2021 West African Senior School Certificate Examinations.

In their monitoring report, Africa Education Watch said that 55% of the papers they sampled were leaked within 10 hours before the start of the exam.

They warned that if issues of examination malpractice and leakage are left unaddressed, it will lead to the "devaluation of WAEC's certificates in the local and international tertiary space and the world of work."

But the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), the body in charge of the WASSCE exams, criticised the report.

Addressing the press on Friday, the WAEC's Public Relations Officer, Agnes Teye-Cudjoe, said that some schools cited in the report were either not operational or were not among the list of WASSCE-writing schools for the year under review.

The schools, according to WAEC, are Insaaniyaa Senior High School, Beposoman Muslims Senior High School, and Kikam Senior High School.

"When we look at the list of schools that Eduwatch claims that they monitored, these schools are not on our list of schools that took part in the WASSCE, so we wish to ask Eduwatch to give us further clarification because we have taken note of some of the issues raised in the report," Agnes Teye-Cudjoe said.

Responding to WAEC's rejoinder, Executive Director of Africa Education Watch, Kofi Asare, said it never claimed that the three schools had engaged in examination malpractice.

 "WAEC says that the three schools were not on their list of schools, and they have a point. Kikam SHS is a technical institute. We monitored Kikam Technical for NABTEX. In the report, we noted that it was NABTEX Social Studies 1 & 2 that leaked.

"We reported that NABTEX 1 & 2 also leaked. We couldn't have reported that there was a leakage in NABTEX English and Social Studies if we did not monitor from the Technical Institute," he said on Joy FM's Top Story with Ernest Manu.

He insisted that the Think Tank did not in any way suggest, in its report, that WAEC was responsible for the organisation of NABTEX exams.

On the issues raised by WAEC on Beposoman Muslims SHS and Insaaniyaa SHS, Kofi Asare admitted that there were errors.

In the case of Beposoman Muslims SHS, he said that they had got the name wrongly.

Howbeit, he indicated that they rightly did so subsequently in the report - rightly mentioning their name as

Also, he said that Insaaniyaa SHS was sampled for the report because of incidents of malpractice recorded during last year's exams.

However, upon realising that the school did no longer exist, it replaced it with Apam SHS, also in the Central Region.

"The mistake in the Appendix of the report is that Insaaniyaa still came up instead of Apam. We did not make any findings on Insaaniyaa because the school was not there," Kofi Asare admitted.

Meanwhile, Deputy Ranking Member on Education Committee of Parliament, Clement Abas Apaak, says that WAEC cannot be trusted to hold credible examinations.

"In all honesty, if there is any institution in this matter that ought not to be trusted, whose sincerity is questionable, it is WAEC and not Africa Education Watch," he asserted.

He questioned the government's commitment to addressing the issues of exam malpractice in the country.