By Peter Anti PARTEY, PhD.
The Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) was established under Ghana’s 1987 educational reforms as the bridge between junior secondary school (JSS) – now junior high school (JHS) – and both senior secondary schools (SHS) and Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) institutions.
First administered in 1990, it originally served two key functions: to certify completion of basic education and to place students into appropriate secondary-level programmes.
Over the years, however, the BECE’s role has shifted. Today, it primarily determines placement as most public and private employers seldom use BECE results in recruitment.
Critics argue that the exam’s stanine grading system, focused on norm-referenced ranking rather than absolute performance, can yield artificially constrained grade distributions and mask individual achievement.
The recent introduction of Free Senior High School (SHS) eliminated the historic cutoff points and rollout of the National Standardised Test (NST) has further blurred the BECE’s placement function.
Under the original national pre-tertiary assessment framework, the NST was intended to generate longitudinal performance data for each learner at Basic two, four, six and eight. Such data should have created robust profiles to guide students’ educational trajectories. In practice, however, the NST has not fulfilled this vision.
Given these developments and the broader goal of ensuring an unobstructed path from basic to secondary education, it is timely to reconsider the BECE’s purpose within Ghana’s pre-tertiary system.
As the National Education Forum (NEF) has presented its work, it will be interesting to know its recommendations on the BECE’s future. It is important for stakeholders to continue weighing whether the exam still advances our educational objectives or if a more effective assessment model should replace it.
The NEF’s final report, recently presented to President Mahama, will expectedly propose a bold reimagining of Ghana’s education system, including how student performance is assessed.
The forum was designed to highlight learning deficits in literacy and numeracy – especially in underserved areas – and a mismatch between the curriculum and real-world skills.
Stakeholders look forward to what proposals will be made and the implementation process.
I wish all current BECE candidates the very best in their examinations.
About the writer
The writer is a lecturer at University of Cape Coast and Executive Director, IFEST-Ghana.
