Published: August 5, 2026
MONROVIA — Results for Liberia’s 2026 West African Senior School Certificate Examination will be released on or before Aug. 14, the West African Examinations Council said Tuesday, and the claim circulating online that about 600,000 candidates’ results have been withheld describes roughly ten times more students than took the exam.
Only 57,391 candidates registered for this year’s WASSCE nationwide, and slightly fewer than that actually sat, said Dale G. Gbotoe, head of WAEC’s Liberia National Office. He said about 90% of post-examination processing is complete and that every script has been marked.
“Just this morning, we saw a release. I guess that release is for one of you because maybe a media institution in Liberia has information that we at WAEC are not aware of. In fact, the number of candidates mentioned is not even the number we have taking the exam. It is being reported that there are close to 600,000-plus students whose results are being withheld, and so forth,” Gbotoe said at the Ministry of Information’s regular press briefing.
He said 1,126 senior high schools presented candidates, including two schools in the Republic of Guinea that follow Liberia’s national curriculum. The examination was administered at 401 centers, 400 of them in Liberia and one in Guinea, with 401 supervisors, 1,435 recruited proctors and 353 distribution points for examination materials.
Gbotoe said the government paid examination fees for all 57,391 registered candidates.
He said the council recorded no leakage of examination papers this year.
“The exam this year was administered leakage-free. There was no indication that any of our examination papers got out before the scheduled time stated on the timetable,” he said.
For the first time, Liberian students sat technical and vocational subjects as school candidates, Gbotoe said. He said students at Booker Washington Institute took examinations in subjects including animal husbandry, auto electrical works, auto mechanics, basic electricity, blocklaying and bricklaying, catering craft practice, crop husbandry, metalwork, plumbing and pipe fitting, tailoring, technical drawing, and welding and fabrication.
WAEC also introduced a digital attendance platform this year that allowed the council to track who was sitting the exam in real time from its Monrovia headquarters, Gbotoe said.
“I could sit at the national office, or be anywhere, and if you asked me whether a particular person was sitting the exam in River Gee, I could tell you in real time that this number of candidates sat for the exam,” he said.
The system did not work everywhere. Gbotoe said some school authorities were not adequately prepared to use it, which left WAEC unable to capture every candidate’s attendance electronically.
The release date is not WAEC’s alone to set. Gbotoe said the results must go to certain authorities before they are made public.
“I am confident that the results will be released before Aug. 14. However, before the public release, certain authorities must first have access to the results. I can assure you that, hopefully by early next week, those authorities will receive them. Once the Ministry of Education agrees on the release date, it is possible that we will release the results before Aug. 14,” he said.
Last year’s WASSCE drew 51,719 registered candidates across 379 centers, and WAEC withheld the results of 1,944 of them over suspected examination malpractice.
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