Academic City Dean Prof. Antwi exposes flaws in Ghana's education model
As nations worldwide reconsider what constitutes meaningful education in the 21st century, Ghana finds itself at a critical juncture regarding how student learning is measured and valued. Professor Enoch Opoku Antwi, Dean of Academic City University College, has entered this debate with a pointed critique of the country’s dominant assessment framework—one that he argues may be measuring the wrong things in the wrong way.
Speaking on The Career Trail programme, Prof. Antwi challenged the widespread ‘40% continuous assessment, 60% final examinations’ model that structures academic evaluation across much of Ghana’s educational system. His concern centers not merely on the numerical weighting but on what these proportions incentivize in student behavior and institutional practice. ‘You have a situation here in Ghana where continuous assessment is 40% for the whole semester, and then your examinations are 60%,’ he observed. ‘So if, on the day you are writing the examinations, you are ill, or anything happens to you, you fail. I mean, how?’ This fragility—where a single day’s performance can outweigh months of consistent work—reveals what he sees as a fundamental misalignment between assessment design and educational objectives.
The current model, according to Prof. Antwi, systematically rewards memorization over genuine comprehension. His colorful description of student behavior—’chew, pour, pass, and then forget everything’—captures a phenomenon educators worldwide recognize: when assessment prioritizes recall of information presented shortly before testing, students optimize for short-term retention rather than deep understanding. This approach produces graduates who may excel at reproducing facts but struggle with the analytical, synthetic, and applicative skills increasingly demanded in modern economies.
His critique extends beyond practical shortcomings to question the philosophical underpinnings of how learning is conceived. Drawing comparisons with educational systems in advanced economies, Prof. Antwi noted that those contexts typically reverse Ghana’s weighting: examinations might constitute just 20% of the final grade, while consistent class participation, assignments, and projects carry significantly more weight. ‘There, the examinations are just 20%. Coming to class alone gives you more points than the final examination,’ he highlighted, pointing to systems where daily engagement with material is valued more highly than episodic performance under examination conditions.
This distinction reflects fundamentally different theories of what constitutes learning. In systems that emphasize final examinations, knowledge is often treated as something to be transmitted and received—a ‘consumption’ model where students are expected to absorb information primarily for the purpose of regurgitating it on demand. Prof. Antwi contrasts this with what he sees as the more effective ‘creation’ model: ‘In the advanced world, learning is not for consumption; it is for creation. If I define leadership and you define the same thing from my book, what have we done? Nothing. But when you begin to analyse, synthesise and create something out of what you’ve learnt, then learning has taken place.’
The implications of this philosophical divide extend well beyond individual student outcomes to national innovation capacity. Prof. Antwi directly links assessment approaches to economic development, arguing that the emphasis on analysis, synthesis, and application in advanced educational systems helps explain their disproportionate production of technological innovation and entrepreneurial ventures. ‘That is why companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook come from America, because of the way they are taught. Students are made to analyse, synthesise and apply knowledge to solve problems,’ he said, suggesting that assessment structures that reward these higher-order cognitive functions create fertile ground for the kind of thinking that drives economic advancement.
His recommendations for reform are grounded in both comparative evidence and pedagogical theory. Rather than simply advocating for different weighting, Prof. Antwi urges Ghana’s education system to evolve toward one that explicitly prioritizes creativity, discipline, and values alongside traditional academic metrics. This expanded definition of educational success acknowledges that the qualities most valuable in modern workplaces—innovative thinking, persistent effort, ethical judgment, and collaborative ability—are often poorly captured by conventional examination formats that emphasize individual recall under time pressure.
Critically, he insists that meaningful reform must look beyond examination scores altogether. ‘True education must go beyond examinations to shape responsible and innovative individuals,’ he reiterated, pointing to assessment methods that evaluate portfolio work, group projects, problem-solving exercises, and other demonstrations of applied knowledge. Such approaches, he argues, better reflect how knowledge functions in real-world contexts where problems are rarely solved through solitary memorization but through collaborative interpretation, creative adaptation, and persistent effort.
For Ghana’s ongoing efforts to develop competitive industries, strengthen democratic institutions, and address socioeconomic inequalities, the stakes of getting education right are particularly high. If the nation aims to move beyond resource extraction toward knowledge-based economic development, its educational system must produce graduates capable of the kind of innovative thinking that current assessment models may inadvertently suppress. Similarly, if civic participation and leadership effectiveness depend on skills like critical analysis, collaborative problem-solving, and ethical reasoning, then assessment structures that fail to measure these competencies risk producing graduates technically qualified but practically unprepared for the complexities of modern governance and enterprise.
The professor’s critique, therefore, represents not merely an adjustment to grading formulas but an invitation to reconsider what Ghana values in its educational outcomes. By shifting focus from what students can remember to what they can do with what they know—from passive consumption to active creation—the nation could align its assessment practices with the actual demands of contemporary life and work. Such a transformation would not only produce graduates better equipped for immediate economic participation but would cultivate the adaptive, innovative citizenry necessary for long-term national resilience in a rapidly changing world.
Practical implementation of such a shift would require reimagining classroom activities and evaluation methods across Ghana’s educational landscape. Rather than relying predominantly on end-of-term examinations that test recall of lectures notes, educators might incorporate more project-based learning where students tackle community-relevant problems over extended periods. Assessment could then focus on the quality of research conducted, the creativity of solutions proposed, the effectiveness of collaboration demonstrated, and the ability to communicate findings clearly—skills directly transferable to workplace environments.
Continuous assessment, properly designed, could become the primary measure of learning, valuing not just completion of assignments but the iterative improvement visible in draft revisions, the responsiveness to feedback shown, and the persistence demonstrated when initial approaches fail. Instructors might evaluate students’ ability to formulate meaningful questions as much as their capacity to answer them, recognizing that innovation often begins with identifying the right problems to solve rather than merely solving predefined ones.
Group work, when structured to ensure individual accountability while fostering collaborative skills, could provide rich data on how students negotiate differing perspectives, distribute responsibilities according to strengths, and integrate diverse inputs into coherent outcomes—all essential competencies in modern professional settings. Even traditional examinations could be reformed to emphasize application over recall, presenting students with novel scenarios requiring them to adapt learned principles rather than reproduce memorized responses.
Such changes would necessitate corresponding investments in teacher training to equip educators with the skills to design and assess these more complex learning demonstrations effectively. Assessment rubrics would need to articulate clearly what constitutes excellence in creativity, analysis, and collaboration, moving beyond simple right/wrong judgments to nuanced evaluations of cognitive process. Resources might be redirected from producing and securing high-stakes examination materials toward developing authentic assessment tasks that mirror real-world challenges.
For policymakers, the transition would require rethinking accountability metrics that currently emphasize examination pass rates. New indicators might track graduation portfolio quality, alumni innovation metrics, or employer satisfaction with graduates’ practical competencies—measures that, while more complex to gather, would provide richer insight into whether the educational system is truly developing the capabilities Ghana needs for its future.
