Students from senior high schools (SHSs) in the country will be examined with the new second-cycle school curriculum in this year’s May-June West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) for School Candidates, the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) has confirmed.
The announcement comes with less than a week for the 2026 WASSCE to start across the country. WAEC has not revealed which schools will be examined on the new curriculum at the time of filing this report. The WASSCE Critical Thinking Questions were expected by the general public to start officially in 2027, when the first batch of students produced under the new Common Core Curriculum sit for the examination.
As per WAEC, the examination is going to be about what is termed the “21st Century Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Questions”. This will be more practical than the traditional questions. Mr John Kapi, who is the Head of Public Affairs of WAEC, disclosed this information to the Daily Graphic by saying that the initiative will be implemented eventually in all SHSs across the country.
How many schools will write the 2026 WASSCE critical thinking exam?
He said the 33 schools were selected to test the programme. After that, the remaining 987 SHSs would be gradually brought on board. He drew attention to the fact that by 2027, all 1,020 SHSs in the country will be implemented on the new programme.
Mr John Kapi stated that “These people are not any special kind of students. It’s just that they are doing the new curriculum, and that curriculum is career-driven. So whatever it is that you are studying right now is leading you towards a certain career path. So you can have those who are into medical sciences, so at every stage you know what you are doing, and also we have those who are into engineering.”
Mr Kapi highlighted that the candidates were not new, and with that, the only difference was that they would be writing a different set of questions under the new curriculum under separate supervision. He added, “So, you could have people doing engineering science. Now we have introduced some new subjects, so you can have Spanish.”
Which SHSs will write the 2026 WASSCE critical thinking exam?
The list of all schools to be examined with the first-ever WASSCE critical thinking exam questions is not fully out. However, WAEC has hinted at the kind of schools that will feature.
The Daily Graphic’s report shows that the 33 institutions included the SHSs offering the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) programme. These are the Bosomtwe Girls STEM SHS and Abomosu STEM SHS.
A total of 473,658 final-year senior high school (SHS) students from Ghana will join their counterparts from the four other West African member countries to sit for the 2026 May-June WASSCE-SC.
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