Education
Source:NewsGhana
Three former students of the Wesley Girls’ Senior High School, Cape Coast have been awarded the 2015 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) International Excellence Awards.
Miss Jessica Ayeley Quaye, Ruth Ewura-Ama Awadzi and Danielle Amo-Mensah, all former students of Wesley Girls’ Senior High School, Cape Coast won the first, second and third prizes respectively.
They were the topmost performers in the 1,824,979 candidates who sat the May/June 2015 WASSCE in Ghana, Nigeria and the Gambia.
A certificate and an undisclosed amount of money were presented to each of them as their reward.
For a candidate to win such awards he or she must obtain a minimum of eight grade A1s and candidates who qualified for the awards competed at two levels – national and international.
Ghana, Nigeria, and the Gambia participated in the 2015 West African Examination Council (WAEC) examination. Liberia and Sierra Leone, the two other WAEC countries, did not participate in the 2015 examinations due to the Ebola pandemic and a change in those countries’ educational system.
The award ceremony, organised in Accra on Tuesday, was part of activities of the WAEC’s 64th Annual Council meeting in Ghana and was sponsored by the WAEC Endowment Fund.
Ms Jessica Ayeley Quaye, who also won the Augustus Bandele Oyediran Award for the Best Candidate in West Africa, is currently a level 100 student of the Ashesi University College, while the other two candidates are also level 100 students of the University of Ghana Medical School, reading Medicine.
Ms Ayele in an interview with the Ghana News Agency encouraged all students to keep working hard to achieve greater heights saying “it is not easy but with prayers, determination and perseverance one can make it”.
She urged students to consult teachers on difficult subjects for clarification and also read consistently to achieve success.
Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyeman, the Minister of Education, congratulated the awardees for their outstanding performance and said their achievements must encourage other students to spend more time with their books, rather than allowing themselves to be attracted to other unprofitable things.
The Minister said Ghanaian WASSCE students for the past four years had continuously topped in the International Examinations and urged other students to emulate their outstanding performance.