Reintroduce SHS cut-off to end school placement tension – GES told
The Free SHS introduction in 2017 and the abolishing of the cut-off point have really compounded issues for the country when it comes to placing BECE graduates into Senior High Schools.
Apart from taking many Private SHS out of business, the Free SHS has also created its own problems, with scarce resources being the arrowhead of all problems. The fact that there are technically no cut-off points for placement into SHS has also made students very lazy. Furthermore, since every student wants to be placed in a category A school even when they do not have the required academic credentials, more challenges emerge.
The competitiveness that characterized the BECE when there were cut-off points has been eroded, and every student who scores even an aggregate of 48 with no at worse grade 8 in English and Maths now finds a place in a public SHS.
If the government is to keep track of all students placed, their aggregate at the BECE, and then their final WASSCE results, the data would have been more revealing and prove that many of the students with aggregates between 30 and 48 hardly make meaningful grades at the WASSCE.
Having this data on students would have helped us know the range of grades that BECE candidates enrolled in Free SHS also make at the WASSCE, then we will be able to tell the weak grades to be considered as cut-off points.
Mr. Wisdom Hammond of Ghanaeducation.org believes the reintroduction of a cut-off point for placement into SHS would reignite seriousness in Junior High School students and parents will be more interested in the performance of their wards as soon as they enter Junior High School so that, their three years of preparation for the BECE yield better results. “The BECE graduates are a set of key raw materials for our Secondary Schools. If we dump bad results or students into our secondary schools in the name of Free SHS, we should not be expecting the bad results to give us excellent WASSCE results. It does not work like that anywhere.” He stated.
He furthered that, “some form of cut-off point is needed. “Introduce a cut-off point in the raw score needed to be placed and some seriousness will return to Junior High School. Reintroduce SHS cut-off to end school placement tension”
An important Education Think-Tank, Africa Education Watch, has been worried about the current approach to placement which has no revealed cut-off point.
It has therefore called on the government through the public education agencies (GES, MoE) to fuse the cut-off points of each SHS in the country into the school selection system.
The African Education Watch is of the view that this will go a long way to reduce and possibly avoid the school placement tension that characterizes placement into all Category A and B second-cycle schools.
Another issue that further causes problems for students is the quest of every student to make their first choice from category A which further makes it difficult for them to get placed.
Mr. Kofi Asare, The Director of EduWatch has called for the pass mark (RAW SCORE) of each school to be integrated into the school selection system so that as students and parents choose schools, they can see the score that a student should make to stand the chance of being placed in that particular choice.
This will further help students and parents to avoid wrong choices during the school selection phase.
“We can reduce the pressure on Category A & B Senior High Schools and promote realistic school selection to increase the % auto placed by undertaking SHS selection after BECE results are out,” the Education policy analyst stated.
Kofi Asare’s recommendation comes after he last year announced to share a document on how the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service can achieve 90% auto-placement on the computer placement system.
READ: How To Check 2023 BECE School Placements in 8 simple steps
Describing the 2021 edition of the computer school placement as inadequate, the Africa Education Watch Executive Director said “this year’s 66% auto-placement is too far from satisfactory, especially where we had 74% in 2019.”
“By experience, the higher the % auto-placement, the lesser the human involvement, and the higher the prospects of system effectiveness. A modest target should be 90% auto-placement,” he said in a controversial social media post