A Popular Akan broadcaster with Skyy Power fm in Takoradi is expressing his disgust over what he terms as lack of due diligence and professionalism on the part of Examiners who set the questions for the 2016 BECE Fante Paper resulting in many errors.
The broadcaster, Nhyiraba Paa Kwesi Simpson points out that, he could count about ten grammatical and spelling mistakes in the Paper 2 with a few other mistakes in the Paper 1 (objectives).
In his revelation, he makes reference to one typical grammatical error in the Part I ( Composition) question1 (c) of the Paper 2 where the statement reads ‘ kyer?w fie a ?tsim ho as?m’.
This according to him is an elementary error to be committed at this level by Examiners of a crucial Examination as BECE.
Nhyiraba explains that, no Fante word under the sun begins with the letter ?, a primary rule any common Fante Teacher must know let alone an Examiner.
Apart from that, the letter i in the word ‘?tsim’ should have rather been letter e and an apostrophe after the letter m or better still the correct spelling should have been ‘Etse mu’ implying in the spelling of a single word, there were multiple basic grammatical mistakes.
He points out yet another error in the Part III Question 3 (a) where a question that reads ‘Kwesi fii fie nt?m’ should have rather read ‘Kwesi fii fie nts?m’ , in fact to him the word nt?m doesn’t exist anywhere in the Fante vocabulary.
There were yet other errors in the same Part III, Question 3(f) where there were two common errors in one sentence
In the question ‘Monua banyin on tuu mo fo d?, y? komm na tsei’ the word ‘on’ should be ‘no’ and ‘tsei’ should have been ‘tsie’.
These in addition to many other spelling and unpardonable grammatical errors were recorded in the Part II and Part III, that is the Comprehension and Lexis and Structure respectively.
The broadcaster is therefore demanding answers to the following begging Questions
(I) The criteria with which these Examiners are chosen
(II) Is proof reading done after the Questions are printed
(II) In instances like these, if a candidate fails to understand the sentence because of Errors, who bears the consequence, the candidate or the Examination body
(IV) If errors in a Particular Paper exceeds certain number, what does the law says about that Paper
Countries like the UK, France, Germany, Portugal, Greece, Spain, USA, Japan, Korea, China and many more others got to where they are now with their own local languages
We are living in a country where Examiners/Teachers of a local language; our own mother tongue can’t even get it right let alone the learners.
This is a Shame, Pitiful and unacceptable!
Ghana deserves better, Nhyiraba concludes