‘Preparing handouts for students must be discouraged’

The outgoing Vice-Chancellor of the Valley View University, Professor Daniel Buor, has recommended that examiners be discouraged from preparing pamphlets and handouts for students.

“This practice must be discouraged,” he stressed, adding that examining bodies must ensure that there was harmony between the syllabi used in teaching and those used in setting examination questions.

Prof. Buor made the call at the opening of the 33rd conference of the Association for Educational Assessment in Africa (AEAA) in Accra yesterday.

The five-day conference, on the theme, “Quality assurance in educational assessment in an era of rapid change”, is being attended by about 300 educational experts drawn from all over Africa, Europe and America.

Seventy-three papers on eight sub-themes had been submitted and listed for presentation during the five-day conference.

Confidence in examination

Prof. Buor expressed the belief that if questions set were based on the comprehensive syllabi prepared by the examining bodies and textbooks were based on such detailed syllabi, students would have confidence in their success in examinations.

He also recommended that examiners must have some basic training in the use of models in information technology (IT), explaining that such knowledge could facilitate the use of computer-based examinations, which would be paperless, “hence cheaper, and with effective supervision, shall be incident-free”.

Corruption

He stressed that the various models of assessment would be meaningless if the canker of corruption in examinations was not done away with.

He observed that examination leaks had been rampant, citing the leak of five papers during the June 2015 Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) in Ghana.

“The material and psychological cost was enormous. The WAEC incurred huge financial loss, while the psychological trauma suffered by the pupils who had already celebrated their completion of school could not be estimated,” he said.

Prof. Buor recalled that following the development, parents and civil society organisations and human rights activists threatened court actions.
“It was a black day for WAEC, whose image was drawn into the dust,” he noted.

Assessment

The Minister of Education, Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, who opened the conference, reminded the participants that as they searched for better and more relevant tools of assessment, the case of differently abled learners also deserved attention.

“You must find ways to retain the quality of assessment when so much accommodation is made to respond to different needs,” she said.
She said the fact remained that the various societies were socio-culturally diverse and the assessments should be inclusive of all learners, irrespective of their situation or the cost involved in examining them.

The President of the AEAA, Mr Michael Chilala, said the conference was an opportunity for participants to share best practices to enable the participating countries to improve on the way they carried out their assessment methods.