A 21-Year Analysis of Students' Performance in West African Secondary School Certificate (WASSCE) Physics and Chemistry Examinations in Nigeria (1999-2019)

The purpose of this study is to analyze the performance of students in the West African Senior Secondary School Certificate Physics and Chemistry Examinations in Nigeria in the years 1999-2019. All the 19,753,590 students who sat for the examinations between 1999 and 2019 were involved in the study. The study adopted the Expo facto research design. The instrument for the study was the Summary of results of students in Physics and Chemistry Examinations obtained from the West African Examination Council, from which the data was gathered. The students’ performance were analyzed using percentages, means, and correlation. These findings of the analysis revealed an unstable pattern in the performance of students in the two subjects. Only 51.78% and 50.84% of the students who enrolled for the WASSCE Physics and Chemistry respectively scored credits and above between 1999 and 2019. The study further revealed that though there was a slightly higher performance in WASSCE Physics examination than in WASSCE Chemistry examination, there was a significant positive and moderate correlation between the percentage of students who scored credits and above in WASSCE Physics and the percentage of students who scored credits and above in WASSCE Chemistry between 1999 and 2019. The study then recommends that all stakeholders work together to tackle all the weaknesses reported by the WAEC Chief examiners report, in which the lack of understanding of Physics and Chemistry concepts by the students is topmost.