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The reason I always hesitate to comment on issues of students’ BECE grades is to avoid committing a fundamental attribution error. The tendency is to always blame children for poor performance without considering the situational circumstances that may have contributed to those results. I am living proof of this. I got aggregate 27 after BECE and it was so good that my father had mother make me guinea fowl light soup . And if you know northern fathers and their guinea fowls, you know this is was a big deal. But I had only one teacher for the whole three years of JSS. He taught Mathematics and Science. We didn’t have teachers for the remaining eight subjects. We had no textbooks, no desks and no electricity. The year group ahead of us had only one person who passed and proceeded to secondary school. The rest failed. The only handwritten notes we had for some of the other subjects were handovers from previous batches of students, dating back five years. Those students had one or two teachers for the other subjects, who gave them notes before quitting along the way. That was what we depended on. Mind you, those notes didn’t even help them pass. They failed too. But at least, they offered a reference point for what JSS Agric, RME, Social Studies or English looked like. Imagine merely laughing at me for getting aggregate 27 without considering the full context and the extenuating circumstances. At the time, the cutoff point for all senior high schools was aggregate 30. Only three of us, from a class of 20, got within the mark and went to secondary school (aggregates 25, 27, 30). The rest either went back to JSS or ended their education altogether. I got admitted to my beloved Kanton Secondary School, and in my SSS class, I had the worst aggregate. No yawa lol. But after three years of secondary school, I got aggregate 13 and went straight to Legon. At Legon, I got a scholarship and went to America to complete my Bachelor's degree. I know the grades sound bad on paper, but sometimes, those terrible grades are a product of circumstances far beyond the child. And sometimes, an opportunity at a good secondary school can be the game changer. So, don’t laugh at a kid with aggregate 35 who wants to go to Presec. Investigate the circumstances that produced that 35. That child may have been performing at the absolute limit of the opportunities available to them. The context is important. Perhaps you give them a different environment, better teachers, better resources and a proper opportunity to learn, and you may see a completely different student. Sometimes, the grade tells you what happened. It doesn’t tell you why.