Randomisation of WASSCE questions to begin soon – Adutwum

Candidates who take part in exams organised by the West African Examination Council (WAEC) may soon be answering a different set of questions for the same subjects.

This was disclosed by the Minister of Education, Yaw Osei Adutwum, as part of measures to curb examination malpractices at every level.

The results of over 3,500 students in the 2023 WASSCE were cancelled by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) over alleged exam misconduct.

The Minister, while reiterating the significance of the randomization of questions policy to journalists in Accra, emphasized the government’s commitment to tackling the challenges facing the education sector.

“More subjects were cancelled many years ago with regard to the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE). You can check the records in 2014; I don’t want to equate in terms of malpractices. We worked with WAEC to introduce what we call serialisation of questions. If you buy any questions, you may not know if the questions are for your region.”

“We are now going on a journey to randomize also WAEC exams. Candidates can sit in the same room as other candidates, but the questions will be randomized. How can you cheat? So this cheating business, we are going to stop it. We as a government are committed to ending cheating; we have begun on a journey that our results and questions are genuine,” the Minister for Education said.

The West African Examinations Council, on December 18, released the provisional results of candidates who sat for the 2023 West African Senior School Certificate Examinations, blocking the results of 4,878 candidates for failing to return learning support materials supplied to them by their schools.

WAEC also withheld some subject results of candidates from 235 schools for giving artificial intelligence-generated answers during the 2023 WASSCE.