By Chernor Alimamy Kamara
Bintu Louis Wright, a student of Providence International Senior High School emerged as the top candidate in the just-released Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) results with an excellent score of A1 in all eight subjects, scoring an aggregate of 6 (perfect) and an average grade of 1.00, according to the Minister of Basic and Senior Secondary Education, Dr David Moinina Sengeh.
Releasing the results, the minister said there were more girls than boys at the very top in terms of performance in the 2022 BECE and constituted 16 out of the 27 candidates with aggregate scores of 6 or 7.
He noted that Wright was closely followed by 26 candidates with an aggregate score of 7, 11 of whom had 7 Grade/Unit 1s and just one Grade/Unit 2.
Dr Sengeh reaffirmed that Providence International Senior High School, which also becomes the top school, saw 100% of its candidates obtain a minimum of 5 passes inclusive of Language Arts or Mathematics, with an average grade of 1.56.
He added that a total of 322 (three hundred and twenty-two) schools saw all of their candidates passing for the senior secondary school general programme. He said another 395 (three hundred and ninety-five) schools had 95.00% or more of their candidates also passing for senior secondary school.
The minister noted that fewer candidates of 2,427 (two thousand, four hundred and twenty-seven) sat BECE in 2022 than in 2021 which he said was largely due to fewer candidates having to repeat the exam in 2022 as many had passed in 2021.
Analyzing the result by subjects, he pointed out that the 2022 BECE saw a pass rate of 84.05% in Language Arts, 87.75% in Mathematics, with Integrated Science having the highest pass rate of 87.78%, which he said is the best BECE result in recent memory.
He emphasized that, for the second year in a row, there are more female students than their male counterparts sitting BECE. He said the pass rate for individual papers climbed from 76.8% in 2021 to 84.4% in 2022.
Dr. Sengeh reiterated that the number of candidates obtaining a minimum of 5 passes inclusive of Language Arts or Mathematics increased by 73.6% during the period 2018-22. He went on to say that 112,131 (one hundred and twelve thousand, one hundred and thirty-one) candidates obtained a minimum of 5 passes inclusive of Language Arts or Mathematics, which he said is the highest ever, even without the 1,167 (one thousand, one hundred and sixty-seven) results t being with-held in 2022.
He highlighted performance variations across subjects which he said none had a pass rate below 70%.
He further said that there remains a large variation in performance across districts, including in terms of average grade/unit and pass rate for senior secondary school in general.
He noted that 7 districts had Senior Secondary School (SSS) pass rates in excess of 90.00% with the Western Urban District emerging as the top best district with an SSS pass rate of 95.38% and an average grade of 3.75, noting that candidates from Guinea, which was the worst performing, had a combined SSS pass rate of 42.98% and an average grade of 5.72.
The number of candidates sitting BECE has increased by 43% in the period 2018-22, reaching 127,889 (one hundred and twenty-seven thousand, eight hundred and eighty-nine) students, according to the minister.
BECE comes at the end of mid secondary education in Sierra Leone. It is administered by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC).
Copyright © 2022 Politico Online (14/10/22)
