The West African Examinations Council (WAEC) has attributed the staggering failure rate in Core Mathematics for the 2025 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) to specific, recurring weaknesses in candidates’ skills across seven key mathematical areas.
Provisional results released by WAEC indicate a crisis in the subject, showing that more than half of the candidates, 220,008 out of 461,736 failed Core Mathematics.
This represents the worst performance in the subject in seven years and marks a nearly 18-percentage-point drop in candidates achieving passing grades (A1 to C6) compared to the previous year.
The seven problem areas
Mr. John Kapi, Head of Public Relations at WAEC in an interview on John Joy FM on Monday, December 1, identified the seven areas where examiners observed significant deficiencies. He noted that these areas are well within the scope of the approved syllabus and test blueprint.
According to Mr. Kapi, the candidates struggled primarily with practical application and interpretation skills, specifically:
- Representing mathematical information in diagrams.
- Solving global math-related problems.
- Constructing cumulative frequency tables.
- Making deductions from real-life problems.
- Solving simple interest applications.
- Translating word problems into mathematical expressions.
- Interpreting results from cumulative frequency data.
Mr. Kapi emphasized that these skill gaps are critical indicators of where intervention is most needed in schools.
“These are areas that the chief examiners can observe weaknesses in the candidates’ performance. Obviously, these are not topics that are outside the syllabus or the test blueprint,” he explained.
WAEC is expected to release further analysis and recommendations for educational stakeholders to address these performance gaps ahead of the next examination cycle.
Source: 3news.com By Evans Effah
