The 2019 Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) has begun with students expressing optimism about obtaining good grades.

The students who wrote their first paper, English, on Monday 10th June, excitedly described the paper as ‘koko’ to wit easy.

GhanaWeb during a tour of some BECE centres in the Greater Accra Region chanced on some students coming out of the exam halls with joy at the Kanda Cluster of Schools and the St. Paul's Lutheran School.

According to them, based on speculations that BECE is tough, they went in nervous but relaxed after seeing the exams questions.

The overexcited candidates described the exams as a normal class exercise or homework and were surprised all questions given to them were simple as well as easy to understand and answer.

The candidates in high hopes after the English Language paper, prayed they get easy and softer questions for the remaining papers in the coming days.

Over 500,000 Junior High School students from 16,871 schools are writing the exams.

Out of the 517,332 candidates, 263,616 are males, while 153,716 are females.

Meanwhile, the West Africa Examination Council (WAEC) has banned the use of cellular devices by supervisors during the exams.

In addition, no supervisor or invigilator is allowed, under any circumstance, to supervise candidates from schools they are affiliated to.



A regional breakdown of the candidates shows that the Ashanti Region has the highest number of 104, 461, made up of 52,945 males and 51, 516 females, followed by the Greater Accra Region with 90,584 of which 43,273 are males.

A total of 55,535 constituting 28,212 males and 27,323 are writing the exams in the Central Region while the erstwhile Western Region is presenting 52,806 candidates, comprising 27,619 males and 23,508 females.

The former Brong-Ahafo has 49,127 candidates including 26,619 males. The Eastern and Northern regions have 47,964 including 24,883 males and 43,960 including 23,900 males, respectively.

Upper West Region has the least number of 13,109 candidates (6,725 males and 6,384 females), the Upper East has 22,001(including 10,812 males), while the Volta Region has 37,785 of which 19,978 are males.