The Director of Secondary Education of the Ghana Education Service (GES), Rev. Simon Asiege has warned that some senior high school students, whose 2013 Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) results were cancelled due to exam malpractices, would be withdrawn.

The directive, according to the GES, is to ensure that the affected students rewrite papers that were leaked.

Speaking to JoyNews, Rev. Asiege explains that there was a mix-up in the Computerized School Selection System which led to the placement of such students. He said the cheating students cannot be allowed to continue their education unless they pass the subjects whose results were canceled.

"At the BECE level, if you have a subject canceled you cannot be placed in the senior high school. But somehow, this year, some of them had subjects cancelled at the time this year's placement center did not know and therefore placed them. But when the results came, they saw that it was cancelled and that was how the school heads reported to us that they have received candidates, who have some results canceled. So we are in the process of getting how many they are and then such students will be withdrawn", Director of Secondary Education of the GES explained.

He noted that the discrepancy came as a result of a change in the system of releasing the results, explaining, "hitherto, we always waited but this time around, we asked them to give us all the results of every single candidate but it looks like at the time that they were releasing those ones, they had some of them whose results were being reviewed because of such activities as exam malpractice".

Meanwhile, President of the Conference of Heads of Assisted Senior High Schools, (CHASS), Samuel Ofori Adjei told JoyNews that regardless of the impact of the withdrawal of the students, the right thing had to be done.

He however, cautioned officials of the West Africa Examination Council (WAEC) and the Computerized School Selection And Placement System (CSSPS) to do due diligent with the placement so that the action taken by the GES is not repeated.

"Those who are in charge should next time around [do] things right so that if the information from WAEC is going to CSSPS, it must have all these information about whether some paper had been cancelled, whether the person has got a fail in any of the core subjects for which he cannot enter the senior high school", Mr. Ofori Adjei noted.