West Africa’s Accounting Exam Fails the Thinking Test, Eleven-Year Study Finds

A sweeping eleven-year audit of West Africa’s most consequential school examination has found that the vast majority of its financial accounting questions test little more than memory, and that more than half of its multiple-choice items contain technical flaws capable of distorting what students’ scores actually mean. The study, published in Discover Education, examined every Financial Accounting question administered in the May/June West African Senior School Certificate Examination, or WASSCE, between 2014 and 2024, and its findings raise uncomfortable questions about whether one of Africa’s highest-stakes credentials is measuring the skills it claims to certify.

The research team, led by Leticia Sam of the University of Cape Coast in Ghana, analysed a total of 837 examination items: 550 multiple-choice questions and 287 essay or sub-question items drawn from officially published past papers of the West African Examinations Council. Their approach was deliberately quantitative and replicable. Two independent raters with expertise in financial accounting and prior familiarity with WAEC examination processes coded every item twice over, once for structural quality against established item-writing principles and once for cognitive demand using the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, the widely used hierarchy that ranks thinking skills from remembering and understanding up through analysing, evaluating and creating.

The reliability of that coding was statistically verified. The two raters worked separately without consultation, and their agreement was assessed with Cohen’s Kappa, a coefficient that measures consensus beyond chance. The resulting value of 0.70 exceeds the commonly recommended threshold of 0.60, indicating substantial agreement. Disagreements were then resolved through deliberative consensus, and the final dataset was analysed in SPSS using frequencies and percentages to map the distribution of flaws and cognitive levels across the eleven examination cycles.

On the structural side, the results were sobering. Of the 550 multiple-choice questions examined, 309 items, or 56.18 percent, violated at least one recognised item-writing principle, while only 241 items, or 43.82 percent, fully complied. The single most common defect was the unfocused or ambiguous stem, the sentence that frames the question itself, which accounted for 175 cases, or 56.63 percent of all identified flaws. In 2020 the problem peaked dramatically, with 19 of that year’s 21 flawed items, some 90.48 percent, marred by unclear or poorly structured stems. Ambiguous wording forces candidates to spend their mental effort interpreting the question rather than demonstrating their grasp of accounting concepts, which threatens the validity of the entire assessment.

The second most frequent flaw, accounting for 88 cases or 28.48 percent, was the failure to arrange answer options alphabetically or chronologically. Though it may sound trivial, inconsistent ordering can create unintended patterns that savvy test-takers exploit, allowing them to identify correct answers through superficial cues rather than genuine knowledge. Unequal option lengths, the classic giveaway in which the correct answer is noticeably longer than its distractors, accounted for 46 cases or 14.89 percent. This flaw was concentrated in the early years of the study, particularly 2014 and 2015, and vanished entirely in 2018 and 2020, suggesting that examiners gradually learned to balance their alternatives even as other problems persisted.

The year-by-year trajectory tells a story of intermittent progress rather than sustained reform. In 2014, a dismal 72 percent of multiple-choice items were flawed, the worst performance in the entire period. Compliance improved unevenly through the decade, reaching its high point in 2023, when 60 percent of items met acceptable standards. Yet the gains proved fragile: in 2024 the proportion of standard items collapsed back to just 38 percent. The researchers interpret this reversal as evidence that improvements in examination construction occurred sporadically rather than as an institutionalised practice, pointing to weaknesses in examiner training, item review procedures and moderation before administration.

The cognitive analysis was even more striking. Of the 837 items classified against the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, 756, or 90.3 percent, targeted lower-order cognitive skills: remembering, understanding and applying. Only 81 items, or 9.7 percent, demanded higher-order thinking. Breaking the numbers down further, 39.2 percent of all questions tested pure recall of facts such as the definitions of depreciation or ledger entries, 15.2 percent measured comprehension, and 36.0 percent assessed procedural application, such as preparing accounts or calculating profit. At the top of the hierarchy the picture thins out almost to nothing: just 5.7 percent of items required analysis, 2.4 percent demanded evaluative judgment, and a mere 1.6 percent, thirteen questions in eleven years, asked students to create or synthesise anything original.

This imbalance matters because the WASSCE does more than grade students; it shapes what teachers teach. High-stakes examinations exert a powerful backwash effect on classroom instruction, and when questions consistently reward memorisation, teachers rationally respond with rote pedagogy. The researchers argue that the pattern risks producing graduates who can execute routine calculations but struggle to interpret complex financial scenarios, evaluate alternative accounting methods, or exercise the professional judgment that tertiary study and the accounting profession demand. The finding also echoes a broader international literature: comparable studies have found that 89 percent of WASSCE Business Management items tested lower-order skills, that only 38.4 percent of veterinary examination questions in the United States required higher-order thinking, and that Finnish teacher-education entrance exams similarly leaned on recall and comprehension.

The study’s authors frame the problem as systemic rather than incidental. Standardised, easily markable items are attractive precisely because they allow consistent scoring across multiple West African countries, but that convenience comes at the cost of cognitive rigor. Their recommendations are concrete: WAEC should prioritise examiner training and structured item-writing workshops, implement rigorous moderation and quality assurance protocols that verify the balance of cognitive levels on every paper, and deliberately design questions that require students to analyse complex accounting scenarios, evaluate competing solutions and synthesise information. They further call for assessment literacy to be embedded in teacher education programmes, including training in item construction and the application of Bloom’s taxonomy.

The implications extend well beyond the examination hall. Because WASSCE results gate access to tertiary education and professional training, technical flaws and shallow cognitive demand in the instrument itself mean that certification may not faithfully represent what graduates actually know and can do, with consequences for employers, universities and the wider economy. The researchers acknowledge limitations: their analysis covered only Financial Accounting, relied on expert judgment in coding, and did not link item characteristics to actual student performance. But the core message stands. An examination that devotes barely one question in ten to higher-order thinking, and in which a majority of multiple-choice items carry technical defects, cannot fully certify the analytical competence that modern accounting demands. Whether WAEC can institutionalise the improvements that have so far appeared only in fits and starts will determine if the credential keeps pace with the profession it is meant to open.

Subject of Research: Quality and cognitive complexity of financial accounting examination questions in the West African Senior School Certificate Examination

Article Title: Assessment of financial accounting questions in the May/June West African Senior School Certificate Examination from 2014 to 2024

Article References: Sam, L., Agormedah, G. T., Kwarteng, S., Osei, M. A., Aidoo, H., Doe, R., & Sah, S. K. (2026). Assessment of financial accounting questions in the May/June West African Senior School Certificate Examination from 2014 to 2024. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1081. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02237-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02237-8

Keywords: WASSCE, financial accounting, assessment, item-writing flaws, Bloom's Taxonomy, cognitive levels, Ghana, examination validity, multiple-choice questions, educational measurement, WAEC, higher-order thinking