GYABAAH LEADS BY EXAMPLE AS PREMPEH BEATS OWASS IN SSCE

February 18, 2005

In the 2004 SSS Certificate Examinations, Prempeh College presented 813 candidates and had 709 students passing in eight subjects, while 76 and 19 passed in seven and six subjects respectively. No school in Ghana has been able to send that large number of candidates to an exam and have such a stratospheric number passing in all subjects. Schools rarely get to have 400 students pass in all subjects.

A stunning number of 22 people got A's in 7 out of the 8 subjects for Prempeh. In contrast, only one person got 7A's for OWASS.

When the exam was initially marked, it turned out that 5 OWASS students had attained A's in all 8 subjects, which prompted the exam council to re-mark the exams of all OWASS students. After the re-marking, all the 8A's earned by the OWASS students were cancelled for various reasons, chief among which was probably examination misconduct. However, because of Prempeh's tradition of academic excellence, our twenty-two 7A's was not surprising to the Examination Board, and so it never raised any red flag.

Overall, Prempeh scored 98.9% {[(709 + 76 + 19)/813] x 100%} pass rate.

The Senior Prefect of the day, VY Gyabaah, set the standard by scoring 4A's and 4B's on the exam, unlike a Senior Prefect from another part of the city who failed the exam miserably. Gyabaah will be attending the University of Ghana in September 2005.

But a statistically flawed national ranking system placed a school like Sefwi-Bekwai Secondary, which presented only one exam candidate, as the co-best school in the nation because their sole candidate passed, giving them 100% pass rate. According to the Leaders of Tomorrow Foundation (LTF), a non-governmental organisation based in Kumasi, the Ministry of Education and Sports' sticking to a quantitative approach in ranking senior secondary schools "is flawed with inadequacies as it leaves more questions to be answered."

According to the Ghana News Agency, "the statement was of the view that the process whereby schools are graded based on the number of students who passed in six, seven or eight subjects was outmoded. The foundation said the league system would give a false sense of superiority to some schools and at the same time give a false sense of inferiority to others." According to the Foundation, when sample size for each school (i.e., number of candidates) is factored in, Prempeh is number one. "It will be illogical to use quantitative assessment to make for instance Kukuom Agricultural Secondary School among the first schools in the league while placing Prempeh at the 15th position. Kukuom Agricultural Secondary School presented 51 candidates and that 14 students passed in eight subjects while 32 and five passed in seven and six subjects respectively."