The Head of West African Examination Council Liberia Office, Dale Gbotoe, lauds Liberian 12th graders for good performance in Mathematics from the 2022 West African Senior School Certificate Exam or WASSCE.

He reveals that among four out of five countries that wrote the exam, Liberia came second in Mathematics with a total of 43,413 passes.

Mr. Gbotoe notes that this is very encouraging news for Liberians therefore, he encourages parents to motivate their children to do their best to change the narrative, instead of "us characterizing our educational system as messy."

In 2013, former President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf described the entire educational system in Liberia as a mess, and stressed the need for a complete overhaul, as the quality of education had declined far below acceptable standard.

Despite the former President's criticism, comparative performance statistics for the past five years 2018 - 2022 presented by the WAEC-Liberia Office over the weekend indicates there has been progressive improvement.

The performance report reveals high performance in English for the first time, and seventy-five percent (75%) candidates passed Biology, with the least performance in history.

Speaking at the Ministry of Information's weekly briefings on Capitol Hill, Mr. Gbotoe explained there are benchmarks that all candidates for the WASSCE must meet to be considered successful.

"There were four exams that were administered in 2022. For the Liberia National Exam, a total of 1,455 schools took the exam. Of that number, 1,060 were from the private sector and the remaining from the public sector. With the total candidate choice of 21,319." He continues.

He says the Liberia primary school certificate exam registered 2,105 schools and 1,447 of them were private institutions. Editing by Jonathan Browne