The
school-leaving certificate which children can achieve at the end of their basic
education in Ghana is called the BECE – Basic Education Certificate
Examination. Pupils “write” this
examination (“write” is Ghanaian for “sit”) in the third term of their third
year in Junior High School – JHS3. If
they entered the education system in the first Kindergarten class (KG1) at the
age of 4 and have progressed yearly through each class, they will be 15. BECE is a requirement for some jobs; and a prerequisite
for access to the next phase of education, which takes place at the Senior High
School.
To pass your
BECE you have to achieve a score of 30 points or better in six examination
subjects. Four of these subjects are
compulsory and are referred to as the “core” subjects – English Language,
Mathematics, Social Studies and Integrated Science. In addition, pupils study for “elective”
subjects, and the best two scores in these subjects also count for BECE. Pupils don’t have much, if any, choice about which “elective” subjects they
“write” – everybody in the JHS3 class studies the same subjects and in Bawku
West District it’s pretty much the same subjects at every school, so really the
only sense in which they are “elective” is that you could decide not to work
very hard in one or two subjects and, as it were, put all your eggs in one
basket.
In Bawku
West District the elective subjects taught are Religious and Moral Education,
Basic Design and Technology (BDT - in some schools pupils can choose between
BDT Home Economics and BDT Pre-Technical Skills, but in others only one of
these is taught), Information and Communications Technology, and French (but
only four JHSs do French). In theory,
pupils should also be studying a Ghanaian language, but this doesn’t happen in
Bawku West because the local language, Kusaal, is not examined and no school
teaches an alternative. This strikes me
as a pity and I think the lack of an opportunity to learn Kusaal formally
probably puts the children here at a disadvantage compared to pupils in other
Regions. I don’t know whether it would
be a practical possibility to study another Ghanaian language that was similar
to Kusaal but even if it was there doesn’t seem to be any appetite to do this,
and I’m also told that there are no teachers who could do it.
In each
subject, the highest grade available is “1” and the lowest is “9” (though in
one spreadsheet I saw a couple of “10s” for English Language). Your BECE is the sum of your grades – so if
you get a “1” in every subject, your score will be “6”. To “pass” with a score of 30, you need an
average of 5 in your six subjects. A “better”
score would be lower than 30 – eg 18 if your average grade was 3. The concept
of a “pass” in individual subjects only exists rather vaguely, as far as I can
tell. People at the office do sometimes
talk about a “pass”, and they usually mean a grade 5 or better. However, when I have asked explicitly whether
grade 6 is a “fail”, I’ve usually been told that “6” is a “weak pass”. Grades 7, 8 and 9 do seem to be regarded
pretty much universally as “fails”. You
could, though, “pass”’ your BECE with three grade 1s and three grade 9s; and
whilst that is unlikely, I’ve seen plenty of “passes” which include grade 6s
and 7s in some subjects alongside better grades in others.
A BECE score
of 30 or better is supposed to guarantee you a place at Senior High School,
though the process doesn’t seem to be automatic and you have to apply. Moreover, you also have to buy the
application form – this seems to be a widespread device in Ghana whereby
educational institutions raise money, presumably to cover the cost of
administering the admissions exercise. A
friend is at the point of applying to universities, and the forms cost in the
region of 200 Ghana cedis – the “exchange value” of that is in the region of £70,
but it’s much more in real value terms – it’s a month’s pay or more for people
doing basic jobs - so the cost of applying to university verges on
prohibitive. I don’t know exactly how
much it costs to apply to SHS, but it is certainly less.
It seems
quite common for people in Zebilla to apply to a Senior High School in one of
the bigger cities further south – Tamale, Kumasi or Accra. If you do this, you might then stay with some
of your extended family there, or you might board at the school. If you board, I think that also costs
money. I’m aware of one person from a
rural location in the south who has come to Zebilla for her SHS, but my
impression is that this isn’t particularly common, and possibly as a
consequence the SHS places here don’t seem to be subject to huge competition
and in the last couple of years places have been awarded to individuals with a
BECE score as high as 40 (though it certainly isn’t the case that everyone with
a score of 40 or better gets an SHS place in Zebilla). Boarding seems to be free, or at least subsidized,
in the three Northern Regions (see previous blog). Specifically in Zebilla, at present there is
an additional subsidy from a female education charity which seems to mean that
SHS here is genuinely free for girls.
I have
wondered whether there might be an element of corruption in these SHS admissions
(not what you know but whom you know…).
Nobody has risen to that bait yet, but I have heard that more pupils are
normally allocated to each SHS than they can actually accommodate, and that
this is to avoid the situation where a head teacher finds him/herself with a
vacancy which can be traded for money. I
have also heard the suggestion that some of the more prestigious Senior High
Schools invite pupils with very good BECE scores to apply for entry – I don’t
know whether this is an officially sanctioned system or whether it’s just a bit
of opportunistic poaching.
Another
rather unsatisfactory but eminently Ghanaian aspect of the SHS admissions
process is that although the school year starts in September, the BECE results
aren’t out until late September (and the certificate, which you need to append
to your application form, doesn’t appear until November/December) - so it seems
physically impossible to have applied and been accepted before the terms
starts. Our acquaintance from the rural
south arrived in Zebilla in November but only actually started at Zebilla SHS
in late January 2014 – so she has missed
the whole of the first term and a couple of weeks of the second (but we’ve also
been told that they don’t actually get taught anything in the first term). Nevertheless, there were some pupils in the
first SHS class right from the start, so maybe a process exists whereby
admission is granted before the formal applications procedure has run its whole
course. Otherwise every pupil kicks
his/her heels for a year.
Helping with
the analysis of the 2013 BECE results was one of the first things I was asked
to do. There was a good deal of
interest, because the District pass-rate in 2012 had been good reasonably -
42.1% - after a disappointing result of only 27.4% in 2011 (apparently the
lowest in the Upper East Region). People
were keen for the improvement to have been sustained. The actual outcome - 36.4% - was not as good
as people were perhaps hoping for, but was not a disaster, and it wasn’t the
worst in the region.
One aspect
of the analysis of the results was that a number of schools in Bawku West
District are being sponsored by the UK charity CAMFED, who wanted to know how
their schools had fared, particularly the girls. What follows is a summary of what I
eventually pieced together about BECE results in general and girls’ results in
particular. I think it tells a number of
stories and I think it allows us to glimpse something of what is actually
happening here. Of course, like all
these things, it isn’t a simple story and I’m going to try not to draw
simplistic conclusions from it.
My first
question was whether 36.4% was a “good” result in the national context. I haven’t found the answer to this – I
haven’t managed to find out what the overall pass-rate was in Ghana, or how the
other Districts in the Upper East Region fared, or what the results were like
in the Upper West Region and the Northern Region, which would be the most
comparable to Bawku West District in terms of being mainly rural, quite
sparsely populated, and a long way from the more developed end of Ghana. My guts tell me that 36.4% isn’t a
particularly creditable performance – “could do better”. Maybe “should do better”.
In my last post
I commented that my colleagues at the GES office here aren’t good at analyzing
data – and frankly I wasn’t impressed that they didn’t know how their results
compared, and weren’t interested in finding out. One of my ambitions is to leave them more
curious about such things than I found them.
Was 36.4% a
good result in terms of what Bawku West had achieved before? It took a bit of serendipity but eventually I
pieced together the following table of overall BECE pass-rates since 2004.
|
Bawku West District BECE Pass-rates –
Overall
|
||||||||||
|
|
2004
|
2005
|
2006
|
2007
|
2008
|
2009
|
2010
|
2011
|
2012
|
2013
|
|
Total
|
40.4%
|
42.4%
|
51.2%
|
70.7%
|
66.9%
|
34.4%
|
28.8%
|
24.3%
|
42.1%
|
36.4%
|
Not, I felt,
a particularly revealing set of results.
Maybe you could say that the trend was improving from 2004 to 2007/8,
then declining again until 2011, and possibly now getting better again. If you compared 2013 with the position ten
years previously, ignoring the intervening years, you would either say that it
was pretty much the same (reasonable maybe if you take 2012 and 2013 together);
or that it had deteriorated a bit. The
36.4% in 2013 was below the average achieved over the decade and only just
above half of the best result achieved. You
would be hard-pressed to say that anything had improved over the ten years as a
whole.
I looked at
the grades achieved in individual subjects, and found another disappointing
story. There was a low proportion of
passes in the higher grades – 1, 2 and 3 – and in fact almost 70% of the
results were in grades 5, 6 and 7 – so the lowest “pass”, the “weak pass”, and
the highest “fail” grade. In 2013, out
of almost 7,500 individual exams, there were only 31 grade 1s, and only 440 results
at grade 1, 2 or 3. That is, less than
0.5% and 6% respectively. There were
small differences in the percentages of higher grades in different subjects –
for example fewer high grades in Maths – but essentially it was the same
picture across the board.
No student
had achieved the best BECE pass score of 6 in the three years for which I could
find data in that degree of detail – the best were one score of 8 and two of
9. There was no trend of the percentage
of higher grades increasing or decreasing – in fact, most of the numbers seemed
to go up and then down again without any discernible pattern, and the most
striking feature was the lack of any obvious trends of any sort.
In terms of
individual subjects, I found that some of the electives had rather
disappointing success rates. French was
the worst by far – only 5% of candidates passed in 2013. Basic Design and Technology and ICT were
better though not sparkling at between 30% and 35% passes. Maths and English were a little better –
between 40% and 45%. The best subjects
were, in that order, Integrated Science, Social Studies, and Religious and
Moral Education – for these the pass rate (defined as grade 5 of better) was
above 50%. I struggled to see why science
should be better than Maths, and Social Studies and RME better than English –
when I asked about these, one suggestion was that the subjects with the higher
pass-rates included more multiple-choice questions. I haven’t checked to see whether and to what
extent that is the case, and even if it is true I would have expected that a
decent marking system would have leveled out that difference and I could see no
reason why Bawku West District pupils should benefit disproportionately from
this fact (if indeed they do).
When I split
the data between boys and girls I found something more definitive.
|
Bawku West District BECE Pass-rates –
Boys and Girls
|
||||||||||
|
|
2004
|
2005
|
2006
|
2007
|
2008
|
2009
|
2010
|
2011
|
2012
|
2013
|
|
Boys
|
45.7%
|
52.9%
|
59.5%
|
76.5%
|
74.3%
|
44.2%
|
36.6%
|
31.2%
|
47.7%
|
42.7%
|
|
Girls
|
29.6%
|
24.5%
|
39.2%
|
62.2%
|
54.8%
|
22.9%
|
17.8%
|
16.5%
|
35.0%
|
27.8%
|
|
Total
|
40.4%
|
42.4%
|
51.2%
|
70.7%
|
66.9%
|
34.4%
|
28.8%
|
24.3%
|
42.1%
|
36.4%
|
The girls’
results are considerably worse than the boys’, every single year. In 2010 and 2011 the girls’ results really
are dreadful, and they are poor every year except 2007 and 2008. The boys’ results aren’t exactly stellar, but
they look quite a bit better than the overall results and the series from 2004
to 2008 must have looked like a good news story at the time.
I found more
detail of the results in 2011, 2012 and 2013, and further examination of these
data revealed that girls performed worse than boys in every dimension I looked
at.
For a start,
fewer girls than boys even “wrote” the exam.
In 2004 only 33% of the candidates were girls. In 2013 it was 42%.
Their
overall pass-rate was worse.
Their
overall BECE scores were worse.
The
percentage who achieved a “pass” in all four core subjects was lower, and more
girls than boys failed to pass any of the core subjects.
Their
individual grades were worse. This was the case every year in every individual
subject, with the sole exception of French in 2013, when 7% of girls passed
compared to 5% of boys.
By this
stage I was feeling rather depressed about education in Bawku West District, at
least to the extent that its value is reflected in BECE results, and definitely
from the point of view of gender equality and the achievement of the
girls. Was there any good news at all?
Well, I did
identify two trends which I think are positive, and I’ve deliberately kept them
till now because they have prompted my next investigations, which are
incomplete at this point.
The first is
that the number of pupils who “write” their BECE has more than doubled over the
decade. In 2004 there were 490
candidates and 198 of them passed. In 2013
there were 1106 candidates and 403 passes.
The second
bit of good news is that this trend is more pronounced for the girls. In 2004, only 162 girls in the whole District
“wrote” their BECE and only 48 passed.
In 2013 these numbers were 464 and 129, and both are the result of a
rising trend, which has seen the percentage of female BECE candidates in the
District rise from 33.1% to 42.0%.
Colleagues
with more experience than me of working in development have said repeatedly
that things happen more slowly than you’d initially hoped, and that the steps
forward are small and tentative. My
sincere hope is that these two facts in an otherwise rather dismal picture are
those small, tentative steps and will eventually lead to results which more genuinely
reflect the potential of the people in Zebilla and its surrounding villages.
In the next
installment I’ll put the 1106 BECE candidates into context, and I’ll tell you
what I have discovered so far about why girls perform less well than boys in
this significant examination.
Just for a
bit of fun, I’ve typed below some questions from the BECE mock exams last year. Each subject has a 45 minute paper during
which candidates answer 40 multiple-choice questions – this selection come from
those papers.
ENGLISH
LANGUAGE
1 Insert the word which most suitably
completes the sentence.
* I have ……….. an improvement in our food.
A. notified B. watched C.
noted D. noticed
* The players were trotting onto the field
when we …………….. at the stadium.
A. arrive B. have arrived C. were arriving D.
arrived
* The workers are protesting ………… the
management’s new plans.
A. at B. against C. between D. connecting
2 Choose the word nearest in meaning to
the underlined word
* James was so wicked that all his friends abhorred
him.
A. dismissed B. beat C.
hated D. ignored
* Most men normally do not wear costly
jewelry.
A. good B. expensive C. shiny D.
new
3 Choose the word most nearly opposite
in meaning to the underlined word
* The classroom is surprisingly chaotic.
A. busy B. dirty C. hectic D. orderly
* Do not despise poor people because
you are rich.
A. cheat B. avoid C. admire D.
annoy
4 Choose the phrase which best explains
the underlined word or phrase
* Adzo’s bad manners make her the black
sheep of the family. This means that
Adzo is a….
A. bully B. destroyer C. disgrace D.
liar
* Issah was asked to toe the line or
quit the team. This means Issah was asked
to ….
A. apologise B. resign C.
change D. obey
5 Literature
* Which of the following best describes the
term literature?
A.
Imaginative writing B. work of art C. Creative and imaginative writing D. Artistic drawing
* Literature is a bit different from any
ordinary piece of writing in English especially through……
A. its use
of vocabulary B. artistic use of
language C. rhyming D. advanced writing
* One of the following is not a poem.
A. ballad B. legend C. epigram D. lyric
* A simple poem which intends to make fun of
people’s ideas and events is….
A. an
epigram B. an epic C. an elegy D. a lyric
* A literary
device that exaggerates for the purpose of creating humour is…..
A. an irony B. euphemism C.
metaphor D. hyperbole
* A literary device that puts two opposite
words side by side for an effect is called….
A. an
oxymoron B. egnedoche C. onomatopoeia D. paradox
SOCIAL
STUDIES
* Which of the following is not an ethnic
group?
A. Asante B. Akan C. Ga-adangbe D.
Mole-Dagbani
* The scale 1cm = 7km in representative ratio
is….
A. 1:700,000 B. 1:7000 C. 1cm 7km D. 1cm 14km
* Which of these is a satellite?
A. The Sun B. The Moon C.
The Earth D. The Meteorite
* General pardon for offences against the
state is done by the…..
A. Chief
Justice B. Appeals
Court Judge C. Vice
President D. President
* Law and order can be enforced at home
through all the following except…..
A. scolding B. advice C.
capital punishment D. withdrawal of
privileges
* ………….. is added to salt to prevent goiter
A. Mercury B. Iodine C.
Hydrogen D. Proton
* Which people celebrate the Akwantukese
festival?
A. Kwamawu B. Tachiman C. New Juabeng D.
Akim Oda
* Who was the chief of Elmina in 1471 when the
first Europeans arrived there?
A. Nana Kojo
Mbrah B. Nana Owusu Ansah C. Nana Nkansah Bruce D. Nana Kwamena Ansah
* Which of the following is a physical change
in an adolescent boy?
A. Ovulation B. Enlargement of breast C. Broadened hips D. Broken voice
* The business concern set up by an individual
or state to provide essential goods and services to satisfy human needs is a/an…
A.
entrepreneur B. company C.
insurance D. enterprise
MATHEMATICS
* Expand and simplify 2(a + 3b) – 5a(2 + 3b)
A. 6b – 12a –
15ab B. 6b – 8a – 15ab C. 6b + 8a – 15ab D. 6b – 8a + 15ab
* The image of x in the mapping x
5x – 3 is 12.
Find x.
A. 5 B. 4 C.
3 D. 2
* Find the slope of the line which passes
through the points A (5, -2) and B (6, 8).
A. 1/10 B.
10/1 C. -1/10 D. 7/14
* Arrange 0.75, 0.67 and 0.6 in descending
order.
A. 0.6,
0.67, 0.75 B. 0.6, 0.75, 0.67 C. 0.67, 0.6, 0.75 D. 0.75, 0.67, 0.6
* Write 0.06998 correct to two significant
figures.
A. 0.006 B. 0.007 C.
0.070 D. 0.059
* John is 7 years older than his sister. The sum of their ages is 63. Find his sister’s age.
A. 7 B.
18 C.
28 D.
35
* The area of a circle is 6.16m2. Find the radius.
A. 7m B.
14m C. 21m D.28m
* Write 2454 in standard form.
A. 2.454 x
10-2 B. 2.454 x 10-3 C. 2.454 x 102 D. 2.454 x 103
* By how much is 5/8 greater than 3/8?
A. 3/8 B. 2/8 C. 1/8 D. 5/6
* A point P (5,7) is rotated through an angle
of 90o anti-clockwise about the origin 0. Find the image P1 of the rotation.
A. (-7, 5) B. (-7, -5) C. (7, -5) D. (-5,
7)
* Find the truth set of -3(x + 5)
30.
A. {x : x
-15} B.
{x : x
-15} C.
{x : x
-15} D.
{x : x
-15}
INFORMATION AND
COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY
* Which of these characters is not
allowed in folder names?
A. @ B. ) C. / D. $
* When information is exchanged on the
internet, the message is sent out and broken up into several pieces of the same
size called………..
A. servers B. destination C. software D.
packets
* The second longest key on the keyboard
layout is the……………..
A. spacebar
key B.
shift key C. tab key D. backspace key
* Which of these is a shortcut command for
printing a document in Microsoft Word?
A. Ctrl + C B. Shift + P C. Ctrl + P D. Alt + P
* The first
point of contact for locating any information on the web is through a/an………..
A. website B. web browser C. internet D. explorer
* The raw material from which information is
obtained is called ………..
A. output B. data C.
processing D. storage
* Which of these is a peripheral to the
computer?
A. Keyboard B. Mouse C.
Floppy disk D. Camera
* The power switch of a computer is mostly
located at the …………………. Panel.
A. back B.
side C. front D. middle
* The …………….. bar displays the name of the
document and the application being used.
A. standard B. menu C.
title D. task
* The top row of icons in Microsoft Paint are……………..
A. Selection
tools B. Airbrush tools C. Pencil tools D. Line tools
