WAEC MATHS:WHY CHEAT AFTER WAEC PROVIDED YOU WITH THESE GUIDES?(1)

examination hall

GCE – Nov/Dec. 2007

General Comments

The Mathematics Paper II for November/December 2007 WASSCE maintained the same standard as those of

previous years.  The rubrics were clear and the questions were within the content of the syllabus.

The questions were unambiguous and they were loaded with many skills to show the understanding of

the topic.   The marking scheme was quite detailed, liberal, clear, generous and easy to follow.

There seemed to be a slight improvement in the performance of candidates in some centers.  It was

also observed that candidates performed better in Section A than in Section B and there were few

cases of candidates copying each other.  In general, the performance of candidates compared

favourably with those of previous years.

Candidates’ Weaknesses

From their responses, it was observed that some aspects of the syllabus were poorly handled by the

candidates. This demonstrated clearly lack of knowledge of the topics on the part of the candidates.

Apart from non-adherence to instructions and rubrics of the question, the candidates also exhibited

significant weakness in

(1) manipulating numerals and decimals;
(2) theory of logarithms;
(3) mensuration – solving problems on 3-dimensional shapes;
(4) construction;
(5) reading and solving problems from graphs.

Although question 13 was very popular among the candidates, many candidates made poor attempt on it.

In the (a) part, candidates were guilty of premature approximation or they did not approximate to

the desired places. While in the (b) part, many candidates did not use the angle at the centre of

the circle but that at the circumference. Some candidates also did not use curly brackets when

listing the elements of sets.

Candidates’ Strengths

Generally, outstanding performances were noticed in the following topics where a good number of

candidates earned good marks:

(1) Inequality;

(2) Set theory;

(3) Surds;

(4) Number bases

(5) Drawing quadratic graph;

(6) Plane geometry – circle theorems;

(7) Commercial arithmetic – compound interest and depreciation;

(8) Construction of cumulative frequency tables and drawing Ogives

(9) Longitude and latitude;

(10) Area of shaded segment.