When the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) posted the 2025 WASSCE results online on November 29, the numbers did the shouting. Fewer than half of candidates secured a pass in core mathematics, down from two-thirds last year. The share of pupils crashing out with an F9 in maths more than quadrupled in a year, from 6.1% to 26.8%, meaning about 115,000 teenagers failed the one subject that unlocks most university programmes in Ghana.
Within hours, the figures had been sucked into the country’s fiercest arguments: about Free Senior High School (Free SHS), the double-track system, cheating in exams and the quality of teaching. Teacher unions, think-tanks, civil-society groups and partisan commentators have since piled in. The result is a noisy national seminar on what, exactly, has gone wrong in Ghanaian classrooms.
WAEC itself has been at pains to frame the shock as partly the product of tougher policing rather than a sudden collapse in learning. Alongside the results, the council announced that subject results for 6,295 candidates had been cancelled and the entire results of 653 candidates annulled for offences such as bringing mobile phones into exam halls. A further tens of thousands of scripts are being investigated, and 35 people, including 19 teachers, face prosecution.
WAEC officials say stringent measures introduced during the 2025 exams – more roaming inspectors, stricter phone checks, closer monitoring of social media “apor” (leaked questions) channels – exposed both malpractice and underlying weaknesses. In a recent briefing the council listed seven areas where candidates struggled in mathematics, including basic algebraic manipulation and application of concepts, and linked the poor performance to over-reliance on question spotting and rote practice.
The Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service (GES) have seized on that line. The ministry has argued that the spike in failures and cancellations is “the price of integrity”: an inevitable outcome of a crackdown on cheating that had previously inflated scores. GES has gone further, insisting that the 2025 grades are a “true reflection” of what students know and attributing the slide to enhanced supervision rather than to any fundamental breakdown of the Free SHS model.
To critics, that sounds uncomfortably like moving the goalposts. To supporters of the government’s flagship Free SHS programme, it is overdue honesty about a system that has long relied on shortcuts.
Teacher unions have reacted with less spin and more gloom. Angel Carbonu, president of the National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT), says he is “not surprised” by the outcome and describes the results as a “true reflection” of what schools are able to produce under current conditions. He points to the double-track calendar, overcrowded classrooms, inconsistent contact hours and inadequate learning materials as structural constraints that no amount of exam-hall discipline can fix.
The Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) has sounded a similar note. Its president has warned that the 2025 figures confirm a longer-term decline in educational standards, adding that many students arrive at senior high school with weak foundations, and that some “do not like learning” partly because nothing in their environment rewards sustained study. The union has called for better teacher deployment, more support for remedial teaching and a sober look at class sizes and infrastructure rather than “annual blame games” when WASSCE results are released.
Union leaders accept that malpractice must be stamped out. But they bristle at suggestions that stricter invigilation alone explains the collapse in maths performance. In their telling, enforcement has simply removed the cosmetic gloss from a system that has been underfunded and overstretched since Free SHS pushed enrolments up without a commensurate rise in investment.
Civil-society groups and education think-tanks have been the loudest voices trying to place the 2025 results in a longer time series rather than a single bad year.
Kofi Asare of Africa Education Watch, an influential watchdog, notes that the average pass rate across the four core subjects is about 57.8%, the lowest since 2018, after several years in which English, science and social studies were edging up while maths lagged. He argues that this year’s sudden slump in maths – an 18-point drop in the pass rate in just twelve months – is the most visible symptom of deeper problems in how numeracy is taught from basic school upwards.
Dr Peter Anti of the Institute for Education Studies (IFEST) has cautioned against drawing sweeping national conclusions from aggregate numbers alone. He is calling for a “school-by-school investigation” into the decline, noting that some schools have maintained or improved their performance while others have crashed. Such a granular review, he argues, would distinguish between schools that are managing to teach to the curriculum under Free SHS and those that are simply warehousing students.
Opinion pieces in outlets such as News Ghana and ModernGhana have framed the results as a “national alarm bell” and a “failure surge” that reflects an education system in slow crisis rather than a one-off shock. They highlight the sharp increase in F9s across all core subjects – not just in maths but also in social studies and integrated science – as evidence that students are struggling with comprehension and application, not just calculation.
Some veteran educationists see a perverse upside. Prof Stephen Adei, a former rector of GIMPA, has suggested that tighter invigilation has finally stopped “manufacturing” WASSCE passes, exposing the true state of learning. In his view, the painful 2025 figures may be a necessary starting point for serious reform.
No major national statistic in Ghana escapes partisan tug-of-war, and WASSCE is now firmly in the trenches of the Free SHS battle.
Figures aligned with the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) argue that high enrolment under Free SHS has inevitable teething problems and that the combination of mass access and stricter exam supervision will, in time, deliver more credible outcomes. Pro-government commentators have pointed to earlier analyses that cast the double-track system as a “triumph” in using existing infrastructure to admit more students, and now say the 2025 numbers simply reveal where further support is needed.
Opposition voices and critics of Free SHS see the same data as proof that the policy has overextended the system. Commentaries circulating on social media and partisan platforms argue that crammed dormitories, overworked teachers and under-resourced science labs make sustained learning almost impossible. Some activists are using the results to renew calls for means-testing Free SHS, or at least introducing minimum BECE cut-off points for beneficiaries, as proposed earlier this year by heads of assisted secondary schools.
Both sides are happy to weaponise the maths numbers. Supporters of the status quo blame a culture of “apor” and last-minute question spotting that has finally been interrupted. Opponents counter that the state’s proud talk of access rings hollow if one in four candidates ends up with a terminal fail in a compulsory subject.
Outside the policy bubble, the debate feels more visceral. Social-media comment threads under JoyNews and other outlets are filled with anxious posts from parents whose children missed a pass in maths or social studies by a single grade, and from students lamenting that years of schooling have ended in a dead end. Many point out that an F9 in core maths effectively slams the door on most degree programmes in public universities.
Others are angry that their children’s results have been cancelled or withheld because of suspected malpractice in centres they insist were poorly supervised. For families who invested in extra classes and mock exams, the news that more than 7,000 candidates have had results cancelled or are under investigation feels like collective punishment. WAEC and GES reply that the integrity of the certificate must trump individual hardship, but that is a hard sell to a candidate whose entire result slip carries the word “cancelled”.
At the same time, some parents quietly welcome the crackdown. Anecdotally, they say the normalisation of leaked questions and answer-sharing in WhatsApp groups had made it impossible to tell whether high marks reflected ability or access to “help”. For them, the 2025 cohort has been sacrificed to a necessary reset.
Strip away the noise and a rough consensus emerges from Ghana’s cacophonous commentary. Few serious actors dispute the headline facts: maths performance has slumped, failure rates in the core subjects are uncomfortably high, and the 2025 results are worse than anything seen in the past four years. Almost everyone agrees that malpractice had become a serious threat to the credibility of the WASSCE and that WAEC was right to tighten supervision.
The arguments lie in what to do next. Officialdom prefers a narrow story in which enforcement is the main change, and results will stabilise once students and schools adjust. Unions and think-tanks tell a broader tale of structural strain: under-resourced schools, uneven teaching quality, a curriculum heavy on recall and light on problem-solving, and a funding model stretched by universal Free SHS.
If Ghanaians choose to treat 2025 as an aberration, the annual ritual of outrage and defence will resume when the next batch of scores emerges. If, instead, Ghanaians treat the shock as a baseline (a clearer, if harsher, picture of what students can actually do) the unhappy cohort of 2025 may have forced a reckoning that has been postponed for too long.
