Sankofaonline Editorial Board
When institutional transparency gives way to bureaucratic silence, public confusion inevitably fills the void. The recent viral saga involving the Mawerehene of Adoagyiri, Nana Otuo Siriboe Safo Kankam, serves as a textbook example of how poor communication by an examination body can spark widespread panic and damage public trust. When the respected traditional ruler threatened legal action against the West African Examinations Council after receiving two contradictory performance slips for his ward, the issue was not actually a clandestine tampering of grades from excellent to average. Rather, it was a fundamental breakdown in how academic assessment data is interpreted, standardized, and communicated to the public.
A rigorous examination of the evidence reveals that the candidate was subject to two entirely different dictionary systems. The first slip, proclaiming exemplary terms like excellent alongside top numbers, did not originate from the official portal of the assessment body. It was generated by an unverified third party website or an internal school assessment software designed to translate numerical grades into flattering descriptive feedback for parents. The second slip, featuring descriptions such as high average and low average, reflected the official stanine measurement guide utilized by the council to contextualize performance across numerical bands. The grades themselves were fundamentally different records, meaning two separate checks or disparate datasets were being erroneously compared.
While the examination council may feel vindicated that it did not secretly alter student performance scores, celebrating a technical acquittal misses the entire point. The fault lies heavily at the door of the institution. For years, the council has permitted a chaotic ecosystem of unaccredited third party platforms, private school mock software, and speculative result checkers to proliferate unchecked. By failing to relentlessly educate parents, educators, and traditional authorities on the precise distinction between their official standard nine numerical scale and arbitrary descriptive adjectives, the council created the exact vacuum that allowed this misinformation to thrive.
We at Sankofaonline believes that Stakeholders deserve absolute clarity, especially when the educational futures of young graduates are at stake. Had the examination body proactively published comprehensive, accessible user guides detailing how official portal outputs differ from third party summary tools, this national spectacle could have been entirely avoided. When a high profile chief and private school proprietors openly accuse an examining authority of systemic foul play, it indicates a profound failure of public relations and stakeholder engagement.
Trust is built through proactive clarity, and moving forward, the examining council must take full ownership of its narrative by standardizing grade reporting, clamping down on predatory third party portals, and clearly explaining its evaluation metrics to the nation before the rumor mill takes control.
