All the results of candidates from 321 schools who took part in the 2016 Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) have been withheld by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) because of alleged examination malpractices.
Additionally, the council has cancelled the entire results of 22 candidates who went to examination halls with mobile phones and received external assistance.
A statement signed by WAEC’s Head of Public Affairs, Mrs Agnes Teye-Cudjoe, and issued by WAEC in Accra yesterday said the results of some of the subjects of 188 candidates had also been cancelled.
Cancellation
“With the aid of the Item Differential Profile (IDP) software, individual candidates from 1,025 schools who were identified to have cheated had their relevant subject results cancelled. The IDP software was introduced to enable the council to detect cheating in objective tests which largely went undetected previously,” it said.
Despatch
“The council is in the process of despatching the results to the schools through municipal/district directors of education. Meanwhile, the council has posted the results online and candidates who so desire may access their results online at the council’s website,” it said.
A total of 460,930 candidates, made up of 239,898 males and 221,031 females, sat for the examination. The number is 5.25 per cent higher than that of the previous year.
The candidates were from 14,267 schools and the examination was administered at 1,598 centres.
Out of the number who registered for the examination, 3,281 (0.7 per cent) were absent from the examination.
The WAEC said the Stanine Grading System was used for the BECE, with grade one being the highest and grade nine the lowest, adding that “with this grading system, it must be noted that there are no failures”.
2016 Placements
The GES has declared 516,867 vacancies in senior high schools (SHSs) and technical institutes for the placement of this year’s BECE candidates.
Out of the number, 832 are public and private SHSs, 151 technical institutes and 41 community day SHSs.
According to the regional breakdown of vacancies, the Ashanti Region has the highest number of 130,512, followed by the Eastern Region with 81,442 and the Greater Accra Region with 53,817 vacancies.
The others are: Volta Region, 56,051; Brong Ahafo, 51,435; Central, 50,931; Western, 35,050; Northern, 27,447; Upper East, 16,435, and Upper West, 13,747 vacancies.
