BECE 2025 Results Misunderstanding: Explanation Of The Stanine BECE Grading System

People are worried about the grades that their wards got in the just released BECE results and this article will take this opportunity to explain the system that is being used to grade candidates.

BECE has moved from being a Criterion -Referenced test to Norm-Referenced Test for the past years.

Criterion -Referenced test assesses candidates against curriculum standards. For example, curriculum standards may set 80% and above is 1, 75-79% is 2 and so on whilst Norm-Referenced Test assesses candidates by comparing the performance of the test takers who sat for the same test. For example, if 500 or 1000 candidates sat for the same test, they will be graded according to how each candidate performed compared with the rest of the test takers.

BECE grading system uses what is called the Stanine System or Standard Nine System.

Under this system, a score is called a stanine score.

A stanine score compares or scales a group of scores to one another using a scoring format that ranges from 1 to 9. It should be noted that stanine scores are based on a group of scores and cannot be used to scale a single grade or score. 

So for example, in grading English Language, the scores of all candidates who sat for the paper would be compared against each other like in norm-referenced test.

In that comparison, the grading will start from the candidate with the highest score, so if Nii-Abekah got 95% in English Language as the highest scorer amongst all the candidates who sat for the English paper, he will get 1 followed by the second highest scorer until 4% of the candidates with the highest scores is reached. So a candidate can score 90 or 89 but will still not get 1.

PERCENTAGE BREAKDOWN FOR THE VARIOUS GRADES

4% of the total candidature = Grade1

7% of the total candidature = Grade 2

12% of the total candidature = Grade 3

17% of the total candidature = Grade 4

20% of the total candidature = Grade 5

17% of the total candidature = Grade 6

12% of the total candidature = Grade 7

7% of the total candidature = Grade 8 

4% of the total candidature = Grade 9.

So it's not a matter that you know your student to be good, but how the scores of your student compares with other candidates who sat for the same paper.

 

 Thank you.

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