Edves records SBA continuously against learning indicators rather than as a column of scores, so the record is complete because it was built as the term progressed rather than assembled near a deadline.
Why SBA records fail
Ask a Ghanaian head teacher privately about SBA and you will usually hear a version of the same account. The policy is understood. The intent is accepted. And the record, in practice, is assembled in the fortnight before it is due, from teachers’ personal notebooks, partial mark sheets, and memory.
This is not a failure of professionalism. It is what happens when a continuous process is captured by a periodic act. Nobody sets out to reconstruct a term’s assessment at the end of it; it happens because there was no practical way to record it as it went.
The consequences are predictable: marks that cannot be justified if challenged, no diagnostic value at all, and a compliance exercise that consumes days and improves nothing.
What the new assessment model demands
The reformed senior high model reportedly includes group projects, individual portfolios, mid-semester and end-of-semester examinations, class and home exercises, and projects — and at basic level, national standard assessments replacing continuous class tests.
Consider that operationally. A school running six assessment types per subject per semester across a full cohort is generating several times the assessment records it previously handled. Portfolios and group projects do not reduce to a number in a mark book.
A process already failing at three or four assessment points per term will not survive at fifteen. This is the strongest practical argument for a system in Ghanaian schools right now, and it has nothing to do with AI.
How Edves handles SBA
- Recorded as it happens, on a phone or shared staff room device, in the time a teacher actually has.
- Held against learning indicators, not as a bare column, so the record has diagnostic value as well as compliance value.
- Multiple assessment types — class exercises, projects, portfolios, practical work, examinations — each weighted to the school’s policy.
- Portfolio evidence attached to the learner, with the criteria it was assessed against.
- Group work with individual contribution recorded, which is the persistent weakness of group assessment everywhere.
- Moderation support, so a head of department can see where one teacher’s marking diverges from another’s on comparable work.
- Complete audit trail, so a mark can be traced to the piece of work and the date.
The moderation problem nobody looks at
Where two teachers assess comparable work in the same subject and year, their marks usually differ — sometimes substantially. This is normal and universal, and almost never examined.
It matters because SBA contributes to certification outcomes. If one class is systematically marked more generously than another, learners are advantaged or disadvantaged by teacher allocation rather than by what they can do.
Edves surfaces marking divergence between teachers on comparable assessments. Most schools running this report for the first time find something, and fixing it is a professional development conversation rather than a disciplinary one.
SBA as a diagnostic, not just a return
The reframing worth making: SBA is the largest body of evidence a school holds about what its learners can actually do. Treated as a compliance return, it produces a number. Treated as a diagnostic, it answers questions no external examination can:
- Which indicators has this class not secured, right now, with time to act?
- Which learners are drifting, and since when?
- Where do two classes taught the same content diverge, and on what?
- Which of our own assessment items do not discriminate and should be retired?
The last is unglamorous and quietly valuable. Schools accumulate questions everyone answers correctly or nobody does, and both waste assessment time.
What good looks like
A school with SBA working well can, at any point in a term, produce a defensible mark for any learner with the evidence behind it; tell a teacher which indicators to reteach next week; and generate its termly return without a compilation exercise.
Almost no Ghanaian school can currently do all three. The first is a compliance requirement, the second is where the educational value sits, and the third is the reason school leaders will actually adopt a system.