The West African Examinations Council (WAEC) has announced that the entire results of 861 WASSCE candidates were cancelled after they were found in possession of mobile phones during the 2026 examinations.
According to WAEC’s Head of Public Affairs, John Kapi, WAEC’s regulations prohibit candidates from possessing mobile phones in examination halls, whether the devices are used or not.
“The rule is that once you have a mobile phone, your results are cancelled,” Mr Kapi said.
“It is possible that the candidates devise a means of concealing these from the invigilators who are searching, or that the search is not thorough,” he stated.
“But the point is that we still find a lot of candidates who go into the examination hall with mobile phones.”
Also, he further disclosed that some 270 candidates have also been withheld pending investigations into various suspected examination offences.
Mr Kapi added that WAEC also cancelled the subject results of 7,434 candidates for taking unauthorised materials into examination halls.
He further urged affected candidates whose results have been withheld or cancelled to visit WAEC’s examination irregularities portal to determine why their results had been cancelled or withheld.
Meanwhile, John Kapi, has said the decline in candidates’ performance in English Language in the 2026 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) was due to persistent weaknesses in grammar and poor reading habits.
According to John Kapi, the Chief Examiner’s report identified poor control of grammar, weak expression, concord errors and spelling mistakes among the major challenges of the decline in the pass rate in English Language fell from 69% in 2025 to 62.40% in 2026.
Speaking on the Joy FM Super Morning Show on Monday, September, John Kapi stated, “When you look at the Chief Examiner’s report, it talks about the candidates’ poor control of grammar. They also have an issue with expression. The concord is always a problem, and their spelling- simple spelling errors occur in a lot of their writing,” he added.
“I think then also the texts that they are supposed to read and analyse, most of them do not have a grasp of the texts and so they are unable to do a proper analysis of the text that they are supposed to have read,” he said.
“There’s also this lack of reading culture. See, reading is one of the major areas where you can pick up language, whether you like it or not,” Mr Kapi said.
He added, “We build our vocabulary, we build our sentence structure, we’re able to even gather a lot more information, knowledge that we add to whatever we know”.
When asked if Social media and Pidgin influence, John Kapi revealed that WAEC had not conducted a study to establish such a link.
“I don’t have evidence to support that,” he said.
The Head of Public Affairs at WAEC Ghana, however, disclosed that examiners observed forms of informal language associated with social media appearing in candidates’ scripts.
He stated, “What I’m saying is that these things that we find in the social media space also find their way into the candidates’ writings”.
“Generally, English Language has been a problem over the years, and one of the things that we’ve had a problem with is the use of Pidgin,” he said.
“One thing about language is the use of it. The more you use it, the more proficient you become in it,” he added.
Meanwhile, the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) has released the provisional results of the 2026 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) for School Candidates.
In the 2026 exams, a total of 512,862 candidates from 1,022 schools entered the examination, comprising 225,270 males and 287,592 females.
The results release saw Social Studies recorded the strongest performance among the four core subjects, with 78.04 per cent of candidates obtaining grades between A1 and C6.
Mathematics (Core) also recorded a significant recovery after a sharp decline in 2025.
The proportion of candidates obtaining A1-C6 in Mathematics increased from 48.73 per cent in 2025 to 60.75 per cent in 2026.
Also, Integrated Science performance improved, rising from 57.74 per cent in 2025 to 62.08 per cent in 2026.
However, English Language records declined, with the proportion of candidates obtaining A1-C6 in English Language falling from 69.00 per cent in 2025 to 62.40 per cent in 2026.
WAEC disclosed that its four-year performance data showed that English Language was the only one of the four core subjects to record a progressive decline during the period.
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