Ghana WASSCE Maths Crisis; Ghana Eyes Emergency Maths Resit for 30,000 Students Barred from University by Single Subject Failure
Education Minister Haruna Iddrisu signals government intervention as WASSCE mathematics failure rate hits a historic low of 48.73%, shutting tens of thousands out of tertiary education.
Ghana’s government is exploring an emergency measure that would allow tens of thousands of Senior High School graduates to retake the mathematics paper from this year’s West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE), after a catastrophic drop in pass rates left approximately 30,000 students unable to qualify for university admission. Education Minister Haruna Iddrisu confirmed the government’s intention in a nationally televised interview, raising urgent questions about the state of mathematics education in Ghana and the futures of an entire cohort of young people.
The announcement comes after official data revealed that more than half of all candidates who sat the 2025 WASSCE for School, some 220,008 students out of 461,640 registered, failed Core Mathematics. The 2025 pass rate of just 48.73% marks a sharp reversal from consecutive years of improvement, and represents the worst mathematics performance in the examination’s recent history.
A Minister’s Warning: ‘You May Destroy Their Career Path’
Speaking on TV3’s New Day programme, Minister Iddrisu described the scale of the crisis in direct terms. The government, he said, is reviewing data to identify exactly how many students failed mathematics specifically, as opposed to those who failed English, the other gateway subject for tertiary admission.
“We are trying to look at the cost implications and probably to direct that all those students who are unable to pass in mathematics be boarded on to write this year’s WASSCE maths so that they don’t stay at home longer,” Iddrisu said.
The Minister’s remarks carried a note of moral urgency. He stressed that many of the affected students had performed competently, even excellently, in every other subject, and that their inability to pass a single paper should not consign them to academic limbo.
“In many cases, a particular student did well in every other subject except mathematics,” the Minister said. “If you are not careful, you may destroy the career path of those young people.”
The Numbers Behind the Crisis
The 2025 WASSCE for School enrolled 461,640 candidates drawn from 1,021 secondary schools across Ghana, a marginal increase of 0.22% over the 460,611 candidates who registered in 2024. The examination was administered at 703 centres nationwide, with written papers beginning on August 18, 2025, following Visual Art project work that commenced earlier in the month.
Of the registered candidates, 5,821 (representing 1.26%) were absent on examination day. Of those who sat the papers, the failure rate in Core Mathematics was devastating. Only 48.73% of candidates achieved grades between A1 and C6, the standard threshold for most university programme requirements.
The decline is particularly stark when viewed against recent trends. The proportion of candidates achieving acceptable grades in mathematics stood at 61.39% in 2022, climbed to 66.23% in 2023, and edged up further to 66.86% in 2024. The plunge to 48.73% in 2025 therefore represents not just a setback but a reversal of nearly three years of steady progress.
Root Causes: When Mathematics Becomes a Language Problem
Education professionals have been quick to offer explanations, and the diagnosis from Ghana’s Mathematical Association of Ghana (MAG) is a striking one: the crisis in mathematics is, at least in part, a crisis in English literacy.
Timothy Dougbatey, the Vice-President of the MAG, told the Daily Graphic that students who lack strong English comprehension skills are fundamentally disadvantaged in mathematics, because solving word problems requires translating written questions into mathematical expressions before any calculation can begin.
“The poor performance in mathematics is due to the students’ comprehension of the English language, because Mathematics is written in English. So they have to translate the English language to mathematical language before they can solve the problem,” Dougbatey explained.
Dougbatey added that the MAG first identified this dual-literacy challenge as far back as 2006, suggesting that the current crisis is the product of a systemic weakness that has persisted across two decades of educational policy without adequate remedy.
WAEC’s Role and the Limits of Ministerial Power
Minister Iddrisu was careful to acknowledge a constitutional boundary in his intervention. The conduct of secondary school examinations in Ghana falls under the jurisdiction of the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), a regional body that operates independently of individual member governments.
“I don’t interfere with assessment institutions. It is the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) that conducts the examination,” Iddrisu stated. His remarks suggested that any resit arrangement would require negotiation with WAEC rather than a unilateral government decree, adding a layer of procedural complexity to what might appear to be a straightforward policy solution.
WAEC coordinates examinations across several West African nations, meaning that any Ghana-specific accommodation would need to fit within a broader regional framework. The Ministry of Education has indicated it is currently assessing cost implications before making a formal determination.
The Human Stakes: A Generation in Limbo
Behind the statistics are tens of thousands of young Ghanaians who have spent years preparing for a qualification that now stands between them and the next chapter of their lives. For students who scored well in sciences, humanities, technical subjects, or languages, a single failed mathematics paper carries consequences that can derail university ambitions, delay career entry by years, and impose significant financial and psychological costs on families already managing the expense of secondary education.
In Ghana, as in much of West Africa, tertiary education is widely regarded as a critical pathway to economic mobility. A student blocked from university entry not only loses immediate academic opportunity; they risk losing ground in a competitive jobs market where the gap between certificate holders and university graduates continues to widen.
The Minister’s framing of the issue as one of career preservation rather than academic policy reflects an understanding of these stakes. The government, he implied, sees the resit provision not as a favour to struggling students, but as a necessary intervention to prevent systemic waste of human capital.
What Happens Next
The Ministry of Education is expected to publish a clearer position once it completes its analysis of the affected population and determines the logistics of any resit arrangement. Key variables include the number of students eligible, the cost of administering an additional paper, and whether WAEC can accommodate a supplementary sitting within the current academic calendar.
Longer term, the pattern of underperformance that predates 2025 demands a structural response. If the Mathematical Association of Ghana is correct that English comprehension has been undermining mathematics results since at least 2006, then emergency resit opportunities, however well-intentioned, treat only the symptom. Policymakers will face pressure to confront the deeper question of whether Ghana’s primary and junior secondary school systems are equipping students with the foundational literacy skills they need to succeed across all disciplines.
For the 30,000 students waiting at home, the coming weeks will be defining. A government commitment to enable them to resit mathematics would restore the possibility of a university future. Without it, they face the prospect of repeating an entire academic year or pursuing alternative pathways that, in many cases, lead further from the futures they had planned.
Reported from Accra. Source reporting courtesy of COTVET.com and Daily Graphic.
EDUCATION | GHANA
Wednesday, March 11, 2026