The founder of Ashesi University, Patrick Awuah, has called for the reduction in the number of subjects junior high school students write in the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE).
Dr. Awuah, an engineer and the former programmes manager at Microsoft said that the current system contains too many subjects which render the examination scheme unproductive.
A Citi FM report indicates that while speaking at the ‘Achimota Speaks’ event, Dr. Awuah said managers of the BECE must experiment with reducing the number of subjects that are tested.
“We are testing too many things. This is not to say we should not teach a lot of things, we should. We should teach Arts and Music and Science so forth, but we should test these three things: Maths, English and Science. The testing can be done more quickly, the grading can be done more quickly.
“The BECE system cost the Senior High School half a year because it is testing so many subjects and it takes forever to come out with the grades,” Mr Awuah is quoted to have said.
Dr Awuah believes it is necessary to experiment with the different levels of Ghana’s education system, to determine the best process that will have the most effective results.
“Why not start intensive English and Maths from day one? Why not do some of these outside the educational system? What if every language show, it is a Twi language caption.
If it is English, then an English caption and it is the law so every TV programme has to do this and let it run and see what happens. And we know China did this and was very successful” he added. Meanwhile, the government has announced its intention to restructure the Basic Education Certificate Examination into a senior high school placement examination.
The Minister for Education, Matthew Opoku Prempeh while addressing a section of the media last week, stated, “that is why the President talks about expanding the technical and vocational area so we can accommodate everybody.
When we finish and we are able to accommodate everybody, we will change the BECE from an exit exam to a placement exam.”
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