The Executive Director of Africa Education Watch, Kofi Asare has called for a review of students’ performance at the tertiary level to ascertain their true strengths.
His call follows the mass failure of candidates who took the Teacher Licensure Examination in May 2023.
Mr Asare was speaking in an interview on the Point of View on Citi TV in Accra on Wednesday.
“We should be reviewing their performance at the university level because what I am seeing is basic grammar and spelling [mistakes]. Stringing together a sentence is not an issue of deficit in our academic system at the tertiary level or at the secondary level. It is a foundational issue.”
“For candidates from the University of Cape Coast, 82 percent failed and 83 percent of those from the University of Education, Winneba failed. So, if you have gone through these schools and up to 80 percent fail then the question we should be asking should rather be at the university level,” he stated.
Again, Mr Asare stressed that it was imperative to find out if particularly the candidates had the same literacy skills they displayed in the exam back in their universities and colleges of education.
“The literacy rate failure is 87 percent. That for me is serious because we have prospective teachers who cannot spell organiser. These are people who are supposed to be graduates from the tertiary level, so we really need to find out if this is the English they really wrote at the universities,” he added.
Meanwhile, Mr Asare early on expressed satisfaction with the failure of the 6,451 candidates who took the 2023 Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination in May.
According to him, it was the highest since the inception of the exam, which was designed to ensure qualified teachers in Ghanaian classrooms.
Mr Asare highlighted the poor literacy abilities displayed in some of the scripts, particularly in English. He considered the failure to be a positive development as it prevents unfit teachers from instructing students.
The National Teaching Council recently released results indicating that a total of 6,451 (83.5%) teachers failed the 2023 Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination conducted in May 2023, and only 1,277 (16.5%) passed. This was after the teachers wrote the re-sit papers.