University of Ghana maintains admission cut-offs despite WASSCE decline

The University of Ghana (UG) says it will uphold its admission cut-off points for the 2025/2026 academic year, despite the poor performance of many candidates in the 2025 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE).

In an interview monitored by GhanaEducation.org, the Pro Vice Chancellor of the University, Prof. Gordon Awandare, said the university has received West African Examinations Council results from students who purchased awaiting results forms and will process them to admit deserving candidates.

However, Prof. Awandare urged students unlikely to meet the university’s cut-off points to consider re-sitting the WASSCE, stressing that UG’s admission requirements and cut-offs remain firm to uphold academic standards.

“At the University of Ghana, every year, we have many more students making the cut-off but not getting the opportunity to be admitted because of the limited number of spaces.

So, it is not likely that we will need to move the cut-off to get sufficient numbers for each programme. We will advise that if they really want to come to Legon, they should re-sit some of the papers and improve their aggregates and try again,” he stated.

The 2025 WASSCE for School recorded a major decline in results, with Core Mathematics experiencing the sharpest drop. A1–C6 passes fell from 305,132 in 2024 to 209,068 in 2025—a decline of over 96,000 passes.

The overall pass rate was just 48.73%, leaving more than half of the candidates below the grades required for tertiary education. Nearly one in four candidates failed both Core Mathematics and Social Studies, raising concerns about university eligibility for the coming academic year.

The release of the 2025 WASSCE for School results, showed that more than half of the candidates, 220,008 out of 461,736, failed Core Mathematics, marking the worst performance in the subject in seven years.

The WAEC data showed a staggering drop in the percentage of candidates achieving grades A1 to C6 in the WASSCE Core Mathematics, falling by nearly 18 percentage points compared to the previous year.

According to the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) data, only 48.73% of candidates attained grades A1 to C6 in 2025. This represents a massive collapse from the 66.86% achieved in 2024.

A total of 209,068 candidates passed with A1-C6, but 114,872 candidates (26.77%) failed the arithmetic subject outright with an F9 grade.

This year, a total of 461,640 final-year Senior High School (SHS) students, made up of 207,381 males and 254,259 females drawn from 1,021 second-cycle schools, participated in the WASSCE for School.

This figure represents a 0.22% increase over the 2024 entry figure of 460,611. The West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) was taken at 703 centres across the country.

In all, 65 subjects were taken by candidates, but each candidate took an average of eight subjects. Of the total candidature, 5,821 candidates, representing 1.26%, were absent from the WASSCE for School.