The Principal of Agogo Presbyterian Women’s College of Education, Ghana, Rev. Dr. Grace Sintim Adasi, has called for a relook at how questions are being set for candidates of the Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination.
This follows the mass failure of teachers who sat for the exams since its introduction.
A total of 6,451 (83.5%) teachers failed the 2023 Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination conducted in May 2023.
The results were released by the National Teaching Council after the teachers wrote the re-sit papers.
According to statistics given by the Public Relations Officer for the Council, Dennis Osei-Owusu, out of the 7,728 teachers who participated in the re-sit exams, only 1,277 passed.
“In all we had 7,728 candidates sat for the exams and these candidates were all resiters. They are teachers who had written it before and they couldn’t make it. The least is twice written, and the highest is 9 times. These are the group of people who sat for the exams. Only 1,277 passed the exams, they are the only people who passed and don’t have a deficit again. 16.5% of them passed the exams.
“It’s a national security threat, we are having people going to the classrooms to teach our future generations and if I tell you the kind of things some of them wrote, you ask the kind of training they had in their various training institutions before they got here. Everything shows that most of them are not ready to be teachers, they just want to explore the system,” the Public Relations Officer of the National Teaching Council highlighted.
Reacting to this in an interview, Rev. Dr. Grace Sintim Adasi was of the view that the questions set for the teachers may not be their focus of study hence the need to restructure them.
“I go back to my position that we should have a relook at what we examine them on because they come to the training colleges, to the universities that do education and we send them to the classroom. They go through all the subjects and their specialties and what do we give to them or what do we test them on, in the licensure exams? ” She quizzed.
Rev. Dr. Grace Sintim Adasi continued, “Is it based on their areas of specialty, or is it a general paper sort of that we give to them? They go to the exam room and maybe what they are being tested on is not their focus. So you can imagine me being an African Studies scholar, my speciality is religion and women and then you are going to test me to serve a nation and you test me on mathematics. So, they should have a look at what to test the candidates on.”
She, however, urged candidates to prepare adequately to pass exams, a requirement for employment by the Ministry of Education.
Ghana| Atinkaonline.com| Porcia Oforiwaa Ofori
