Failed licensure exams candidate says questions unrelated to what she studied

One of the teachers who failed the licensure exams explained that the majority of them should not be held responsible for the widespread failure, but rather the examiners.

Madam Kate stated in an interview on Nyankonton Mu Nsem on Rainbow Radio 87.5Fm that the failures were recorded because the exams did not reflect what the teachers studied in school.

Madam Kate, who began teaching after completing her secondary education, explained that it was inappropriate to ask someone who had studied early childhood education to write an examination meant for someone who had studied basic or junior high education.

"One major thing I have observed is that I have been to the university, studied and passed all my 24 courses without referrals, and been awarded a certificate and my degree, so why should licensure exams stand in my way? Why should I sit for an examination for someone who studied junior high education when I studied early childhood education?”

”The level of mathematics taught in early childhood differs from that taught in basic or junior high school. So, should you pose questions to someone who studied early childhood and expect them to respond when they have no knowledge of the questions and have not studied anything related to them?”

He emphasised the importance of the examiners reflecting on her points and reviewing the process of setting the questions because it was not fair to subject them to the current system.

”If that is the case, the questions should be designed to reflect what we learned in school. If you studied early childhood education, you should take exams in that subject, and the same goes for others. The majority of those who failed studied early childhood education.”

Background

Six thousand four hundred teachers failed the 2023 Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination.

The National Teaching Council revealed the results after the teachers completed the re-sit papers.

Dennis Osei-Owusu, the Council’s Public Relations Officer, said that just 1,277 of the 7, 728 teachers who took the re-sit exams succeeded.

“In all we had 7,728 candidates sat for the exams and these candidates were all resisters. They are teachers who had written it before and they couldn’t make it. The least is twice written, and the highest is 9 times. These are the group of people who sat for the exams. Only 1,277 passed the exams, they are the only people who passed and don’t have a deficit again. 16.5% of them passed the exams.

“It’s a national security threat, we are having people going to the classrooms to teach our future generations and if I tell you the kind of things some of them wrote, you ask the kind of training they had in their various training institutions before they got here. Everything shows that most of them are not ready to be teachers, they just want to explore the system,” the Public Relations Officer of the National Teaching Council said.