Exam malpractice crackdown partly explains WASSCE results – Education Minister
Education Minister Haruna Iddrisu says the 2025 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) results partly reflect a strict nationwide crackdown on examination malpractice ahead of the exams.
Mr Iddrisu made the remarks during a Wednesday night interview on Point of View on Channel One TV.
The minister revealed that even before the West African Senior School Certificate Examination began, he personally toured parts of the Bono Region after intelligence reports flagged widespread examination malpractice.
“Before WASSCE, I was in the Bono Region, from Babator through Kintampo up to Techiman, because the red flags of exam malpractices were dominant in that particular area,” he stated.
He explained that authorities took a firm stance.
“It was zero tolerance for cheating, and that probably contributed to what we are seeing,” Mr Iddrisu noted, rejecting claims that the results were solely due to poor marking or unfair assessment.
Beyond malpractice, the Education Minister said examiner reports show deeper learning gaps among candidates.
“From the examiner’s report that I have analysed, many of the students were not analytical,” he said. “It was more a challenge of application.”
Mr Iddrisu explained that candidates struggled with questions requiring interpretation of graphs and problem-solving rather than rote recall.
“They were given graphs, and many of them couldn’t analyse or apply what the graph was saying. That is what accounted for the poor performance,” he added.
He described the results as a wake-up call for quality improvement across Ghana’s education system.
“The WASSCE results just reflected the state of our education and should serve as a wake-up call for all of us,” he said, pointing to challenges in teaching quality, infrastructure, and learning environments.
According to him, government’s zero-tolerance approach to cheating inevitably affected outcomes in some areas.
He disclosed that the Ghana Education Service, together with the Ministry of Education, is still reviewing the full examiner’s report at the request of President John Dramani Mahama.
The analysis, he said, will guide targeted reforms from basic to secondary education.
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