Hundreds of parents, guardians besiege WAEC office premises in Sunyani

There was pandemonium in Sunyani on Tuesday, when hundreds of aggrieved parents and guardians besieged the premises of the Bono Regional office of the West Africa Examination Council (WEAC). The Ghana News Agency (GNA) gathered that the Council invited the visibly angry' parents and guardians in the region, together with their children and wards, over the cancellation of some subjects in the 2023 edition of the West African Senior High School Examination (WASSCE). WAEC withheld some subject results of candidates from 235 schools for giving artificial intelligence-generated answers during the WASSCE. The examination body announced the cancellation of subjects' results of 3,647 other candidates for bringing foreign materials such as prepared notes, textbooks and printed materials into the examination halls, in a statement issued on Monday, December 18, 2023. During a visit to the WAEC office in Sunyani around 1100 hours, it was hectic for the heavy Police presence to maintain law and order, as some of the p arents picked quarrel with officials of the Council. According to some of the parents, they arrived at the WAEC office as early as 0500 hours when they received the invitation through text messages and added however, at 1100 hours no official of the Council had engaged them. They blamed the Council for negligence and incompetence, a situation they added paved way for the candidates to engage in the supposed malpractices which led to the decision to cancel and withhold some of the results. In an interview, Dr Ameyaw Akumfi, an Accra-based Reverend Minister and a concerned parent, called on the government to intervene quickly for WAEC to release the withheld subjects' results in the supreme interest of the students who were left idling in the house. 'I think WEAC has not been proactive for some time now and we can't look on, unconcern for their negligence and incompetence to affect or ruin the future of some of these innocent children', he stated. Mrs. Agartha Santio, another concerned parent, told the GNA she travelled from Nkrankwanta in the Dormaa West Municipality of the region and arrived at the WEAC premises around 0700 hours, 'but where to sit is even a problem'. 'Our girls are now roaming about in town because they don't know their fate now and so we plead with the government to come to our aid before they become a burden on us', she stated. Some of the candidates whose results had been withheld and canceled expressed their readiness to re-write the papers and called on WAEC to take a decision on that as soon as possible. Others also said they did not engage in any form of malpractice in the examination and therefore, they did not understand why WEAC could take an action against an entire school to affect everybody. Meanwhile, officials of the regional office of the Council declined to comment on the matter. One of them told the GNA they were sent from WAEC Head Office in Accra to undertake the exercise, and added the Bono Region Controller of the Council was unavailable and no official could speak about the matter. Source: Ghana News Agency