Abstract:
It is expected that students‟ performance in internal assessment at a particular
grade level will not be significantly different from their performance in external
assessment of the same grade level. Grounded in the expectancy theory of
motivation by Vroom (1964), this study was carried out to examine the quality
(quantitative) of the District Based Mock Examination and the predictive
relationship between internal assessment scores and students‟ performance in
the Basic Education Certificate Examination (external) for the 2019 candidates
in Komenda Edina Eguafo Abrem Municipality in the Central Region of Ghana.
The study adopted the Ex-post facto design and used the multistage sampling
technique to select 602 out of 2,545 of the 2019 Basic Education Certificate
Examination candidates. Ordinal regression was used to test the hypotheses. The
findings of the study revealed that the item difficulty and discrimination indices
of the District Based Mock Examination were within the recommended
coefficients. However, the reliability indices of the items were deficient of the
recommended coefficients (>.80). Further, with the exception of the Integrated
Science, which had a significant negative predictive relationship with the BECE,
the School Based Assessment for the other three core subjects did not show a
significant predictive relationship with the Basic Education Certificate
Examination. interestingly, all the District Based Mock Examination scores
showed a significant negative predictive relationship with the Basic Education
Certificate Examination. It was, therefore, suggested that the practice of the
District Based Mock Examination should be sustained and regulated by Ghana
Education Service while the Ghana Education Service device mechanisms to
check adherence of the School Based Assessment guidelines by teachers
