The Ghana Education service has turned down calls from the public to hold a virtual West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) or Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) .
Due to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the apparent continual increase of COVID cases in the country, there had been calls by the Ghana Education Service to hold the WASSCE/BECE exams online.
However, Professor Kwasi Opoku-Amankwa, the Director-General of the GES has reacted saying, that Ghana is not ready for a virtual examination yet.
“For now, I think it has to be written on paper because those who are organizing our examinations for us [WAEC] have not set themselves up to have examinations online. We can’t just wake up and do it, we have to ensure that they have the expertise to hold the exams online. A lot of us are holding devices and can play around with them but when it comes to educational technology and the use of technology in education a lot of us find ourselves wanting even at the university level.”
“What we could do as we go forward is to start working consistently and planning towards the possibility of having such exams online. There are so many challenges because the children have not even been trained on the use of such technologies and there is also the issue of supervision; how are we going to supervise a virtual examination? It can’t work now but we should have it in mind so that we can have something like that in the future. It is a good idea but we are not ready for it now,” Prof. Opoku-Amankwa said optimistically for the future.
Source: GHANAFEED.COM
