The Executive Director of the Institute for Education Studies (IFEST) says Ghanaians should not be in a haste to ascribe the success chalked in the recent West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) to the Free SHS policy.
According to Peter Anti, although the Free SHS is doing well, it will be unprofessional to attribute any performance in the regional exam to it as there is no scientific proof to back such assertion.
“There is no scientific evidence to show that the students passed because of free SHS unless of course I’m given data to analyse and I am able to control so many factors that can be ascribed to students performance in an exam.
“I will never be able to professionally accept that students passed the exams last year because of a single policy that ran three years. That will be professionally not right,” he said Thursday.
Ghana swept all top three International Excellence awards instituted by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) which pursues to honour candidates with outstanding performance in the WASSCE.
The examination was undertaken by over two million candidates from five participating countries.
Sharing his view on JoyNews’ AM Show with regards to whether or not the educational policy can be credited to the recent academic achievement by the Senior High students and the educational system, Peter Anti said the excellence does not also mean Ghana’s educational system is top-notch.
“No. It means that we are doing well but the outputs that we are getting are short term results of our educational policies,” the educational analyst said.
“We should be careful ascribing some of these successes in the education sector, basically their outputs to a single policy that has run for just a year.”
Mr Anti noted that although it is important to note that the students seem to be performing well in their academic achievement when it comes to these exams, they are just outputs.
“The way we measure the quality of education within a system goes beyond academic achievement and that is the point we’ve missed since day one when we talk about quality education in our system.”
According to him, the ability of the students to excel in an exam should transcend to their ability to be reproductive to the economy and society as a whole and not end with passing an exam.
“So until we see the education system transforming the economy and the human resource to enable them to contribute to the development of the country where our GDP will continue to push up and we see other thing happening, it will be difficult for us to say concretely that the students passing WASSCE with 8As or a number of As,” he said.
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