WAEC blames poor core mathematics performance on student skill gaps
The Head of Public Relations at the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), John Kapi, has attributed the sharp decline in core mathematics performance in the 2025 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) to specific skill gaps among students.
Speaking in an interview on JoyNews and monitored by GhanaWeb on Monday, December 1, 2025, he explained that while the exam questions were consistent with the syllabus and similar in difficulty to previous years, many candidates struggled with key areas.
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He pointed out that the students found it challenging to represent mathematical information in diagrams, solve general mathematics-related problems, construct cumulative frequency tables, make deductions from real-life scenarios, solve application problems in simple interest, translate word problems into mathematical expressions, and interpret results from cumulative frequency curves.
“They (the examiners) indicated the candidate weaknesses in representing mathematical information in diagrams, solving global mathematics related problems, constructing cumulative frequency tables from given data distribution for making deductions from real-life problems.
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“Solving application problems in simple interest, translating word problems into mathematical expressions and interpreting of results from cumulative frequency curve So, these are areas that the chief examiners can observe weaknesses in the children’s perform other countries performance,” he noted.
According to WAEC’s 2025 provisional results, more than half of the candidates, representing 220,008 candidates, failed core mathematics, marking the subject’s lowest performance in seven years.
JKB/AE
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