The West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) has long been upheld as the gold standard for assessing the academic performance of Senior High School (SHS) students in Ghana and four other West African countries.
However, I believe, after 32 years of operating the SSCE/WASSCE as standard tests for Senior Secondary/High School students, it is about time education stakeholders engage in a bold reformative conversation on high school assessment and certification, in a manner that gears towards improving the rigour and creditability of our examinations and certificates.
The new basic and SHS curriculum currently being finalised is built on the concept of differentiated learning, in timely response to the new global dynamics in education and pedagogy and in producing industry-relevant graduates.
However, standardised testing, as exemplified by the WASSCE, where every learner, regardless of the teaching and learning resources (un)available to them, or their peculiar learning needs, or access to (or lack thereof) of electricity, or socio-economic background are all assumed to have learnt and acquired the same set of skills, hence assessed with the same set of questions, time frame/duration, invigilation and supervision, marking scheme and benchmarks.
