Prempeh College Is Producing More Scientist ....

...And Technologist Students For Ghana Quite recently 8, 594 students offered admission at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) were matriculated into the university. The Vice-Chancellor Professor Kwesi Andam in his matriculation address furnished us with the list of top 25 schools which had their students admitted in to the university.

When you go through the list of the top 25 science and technology schools then you try to call the 2004 SSSCE League Table provided by the Ministry of Education and Sports as unscientific. This is the not the first time I am talking about this. I remember early part of the year when the table came out our organization issued a press statement calling for the withdrawal of the league table as it was flawed with inadequacies.

This was so because the Ministry of Education and Sports was only interested in the quantity of students were passing whether with grade E or D without looking at the quality of the passes.

The idea of the Ministry of Education to stick to a quantitative approach in ranking schools in the country is something that leaves much to be desired. Everywhere we go we talk about quality of the students passing out and not the quantity of student passing out. Today the emphasis is on quality and not on quantity. This is why the Presidential Commission on Ghana's Education recommended that the wholesale promotion of pupils and students be discontinued. Since a mere pass cannot lead students to get admission into higher level of education, it must be emphasized that yardstick for ranking schools based only passed grades has to be revised. A student may have all the passes but those passes cannot lead him to gain admission into the universities, polytechnics, teacher training colleges and so on. Are all passes equal? Certainly not! If a student obtains grade E in core mathematics by convention is deemed to have passed. Like wise another student who also gets grade A in the same mathematics has also passed. For us to be able to make a scientific assessment of these students we will have to go beyond the fact that they have passed but rather move to a qualitative assessment of their passes. And when this done we will know that the one who had grade A did far better than the one with grade E. It is likened to two countries going for war and each country has one hundred soldiers. At end of the war ten soldiers die from the war and the remaining ninety come back. The other nation also returns with all their combatants home with nearly sixty of them having their legs and arms amputated and some maimed. Which of these two countries will be deemed to have a stronger army? A qualitative assessment of the two will tell you that the former is better than the latter.

There are some schools which according the league table were placed higher than the traditional good schools yet according the KNUST statistics none of them were found in the top schools. This is not to say that the KNUST is the only university in the country nor the only post secondary or tertiary school in the country or science is the only programme offered at the SSSCE. Of course after SSSCE you can either go to university, polytechnic, teacher training, nursing training etc. However, we are told that the KNUST admits the cream of Ghana's secondary school leavers, so to some extent I can make some assumption and proceed on (with all respect to all other institutions). One which is certainly clear is that in this country those who pass with good grades will like to go the universities. This is a truth which we cannot deny it!!!!!!!!

For the purpose of this feature let us take a glance of the league table and the top 10 schools which had their students admitted to KNUST.

KNUST RANKING