Former Minister of Education, Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, says examination malpractice in Ghana’s basic schools can be decisively tackled, revealing that BECE leakages were effectively halted during his time in office through deliberate reforms.
Speaking on GHToday with Lily Mohammed on Tuesday, January 20, 2026, Dr Adutwum dismissed the notion that stopping cheating in schools is difficult, arguing that the right systems and planning make it achievable.
“I know that you can stop cheating in schools and it’s easy,” he said. “Do you know that examination leakages stopped when I was the minister?”
He explained that a key intervention was changing how questions for the Basic Education Certificate Examination were prepared and deployed. Unlike WASSCE, he noted, BECE is a locally managed examination, giving authorities greater flexibility to introduce innovative measures.
“What we did with BECE was that it was a Ghanaian exam, so I directed that we were going to have separate questions for different regions in Ghana,” Dr Adutwum stated.
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According to him, this approach immediately weakened the value of leaked questions, as candidates could no longer rely on circulated materials to match what would appear in their examination centres.
“So when questions leak and you think you have questions and you’re in the Volta Region, it could be questions meant for the Ashanti Region,” he explained.
Dr Adutwum said the effect of the reform was swift and noticeable, particularly online.
“The moment we did that that year, all the websites that were selling questions shut down because it was useless,” he added.
He noted that the Ministry went a step further the following year by introducing serialisation, a system where question papers were arranged differently for various examination centres across the country.
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“If you are at Kokrobite DA Examination Centre, question one could be question twenty at Odododiodio or Labone,” he said.
According to the former minister, the combination of regionalised questions and serialisation brought BECE leakages to an end.
“At that point, examination leakages on BECE was over,” Dr Adutwum concluded.
Source: Starrfm.com.gh/Barbara Yeboah
