The annual National Science and Maths Quiz (NSMQ) has gained national status and can be considered to be an academic festival with viewership growing and spreading across the country.
Many do not even understand the questions and answers, but the joy they derive is from how keen the competition goes, and they applaud the winning school. Among those who watch the competitions are past and present students of the competing schools.
It must be added that all competing students go out there to showcase and advertise their schools, and this is very important. At the end of the day, a school wins and the award ceremony takes place.
This national quiz is to encourage the studying of science and maths in our schools, but as this competition progresses to become an international event, something sad seems to be growing and gaining grounds, and if care is not taken, the NSMQ is going to lose its credibility and schools may start withdrawing from the competition.
After all, the main focus of any school is to produce students that will excel in the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) examinations and give the school a good name.
For example, in the WAEC rankings of 2020, the top three schools were St. James Seminary and Senior High School (SHS), which got to the quarter-finals of this year’s NSMQ, followed by Serwa Kesse Girls SHS, and St. Rose SHS. In 2021, St. James Seminary and SHS came tops again, followed by St Francis Xavier Seminary and SHS, and Opoku Ware SHS. According to WAEC rankings, the same order appeared in 2022. In 2023, St. Andrews SHS came tops, followed by St. James Seminary and SHS, and St. Francis Xavier Seminary and SHS.
In the NSMQ competition from 2020 to 2023, among the top WAEC ranked schools over that same period, apart from Opoku Ware SHS, only St. James Seminary and SHS made it to the semi-finals, and that was in 2022. Is it to suggest that these high performing schools, according WAEC, are very poor when it comes to science and mathematics? This is something to ponder about.
Over the years, something keeps coming out of these quizzes. Schools occasionally will come out and challenge the quiz mistress after they have been ruled out for given the wrong answers.
And unfortunately, during the second semi-final contest between Opoku Ware SHS (Owass), Pope John’s Seminary and SHS (POJOSS), and Prempeh SHS, there was a strong protest by Prempeh. The school felt it gave the right answer to a question, but was ruled out. Seriously, this should not have happened.
The Kumasi-based school came out to prove that it gave the right answer since the “principle of superposition” was equivalent to and same as the response provided by the Physics consultant, “principle of linear superposition.” Because Prempeh left of “linear,” the school lost points.
The first riddle of the final round was “I am a physical principle. Even though there is no theoretical basis for me, I am an experimentally confirmed principle. I operate across many domains of physics including mechanics, electromagnetism and even quantum mechanics.
According to me, the whole is equal to the sum of the parts. You call on me whenever you determine the electric field or scalar potential at a point due to a collection of stationary charges. So, Who Am I?”
Prempeh responded by saying “Principle of Superposition” but they were ruled out by the quiz mistress who insisted that the answer should be, “Principle of Linear Superposition.”
Prempeh protested, but Primetime Limited who are organisers of the quiz, stood by the quiz mistress and threw out the school’s protest.
Readers, the principle of superposition in wave motion is when two or more waves overlap in space. The resulting disturbance is equal to the algebraic sum of the individual disturbances. This principle holds for many different kinds of waves, such as waves in water, sound waves and electromagnetic waves.
The principle of linear superposition is when two or more waves are present simultaneously at the same time the resultant disturbance is the sum of the disturbance from the individual waves.
Readers may deduce from the two definitions as to who is right. The quiz mistress or Prempeh College? The Kumasi based school, went on to accuse the NSMQ organizers of a few missteps and miscalculations over the years which have been inimical to their interest.
And this is where I will come in for Pope John’s Seminary and SHS (POJOSS). There has been reports making rounds among present and past students that the quiz mistress, Prof. Elsie Effah Kaufmann, has always been unnecessarily harsh on POJOSS when the two have encounters during the NSMQ quizzes. It was speculated that the professor chooses to be hard on the school, because her son attended POJOSS and she did not want people to think she was unduly favouring them. If this is true, then what about fairness? Would the professor be hard on any of her students who attended POJOSS? Would she choose to downgrade them or fail them even though they may perform well?
What happened during the second semi-finals of the 2023 NSMQ leans towards the confirmation of this. During the fourth round which was based on True or False statements, POJOSS gave a correct answer when they said the statement was false. Prof Kaufmann said the response was wrong. That made POJOSS to have a point deducted from them.
Prof Kaufmann later came to say POJOSS was right and the school would have gone into the final round, leading the pack at 36 points, against Owass at 35 and Prempeh at 33.
It was at the end of the competition that the professor made that correction. The question is, would the final results have changed if POJOSS went into the final round leading the pack? I am not saying Opoku Ware SHS, does not deserve to win and neither am I ruling out Prempeh SHS. But the conduct of the quiz mistress stole the credibility and fairness of such a very competitive semi-final.
The second semi-finals of NSMQ 2023, would have been the most talked about for ages if credibility and fairness had flowed smoothly.
Is the quiz mistress trying to say, she does not have answers to the questions in front of her? Because how can the answer toa simple True or False statement be lost on her? The question was “platelets have no nucleus and genetic materials.” And POJOSS’s response to it was False, but the quiz mistress stated it was a true statement.
She later came to say, at the end of the competition, that the biology consultant stated that even though platelets have no nucleus they have mitochondrial DNA which are genetic.
This is puzzling, very puzzling. Because one cannot ponder on the fact that the quiz mistress did not know answers to the quizzes. So, how credible is this NSMQ?
Back to the issue that most probably the results could have changed if POJOSS went to the final round as the leading school, clearly revealed how demoralized the school was in that round. They could not answer any of the four questions, having thrown in the towel and given up on the competition, which ended, with Opoku Ware SHS leading with38 points, POJOSS and Prempeh with 36 points each.
It is my recommendation that, if the NSMQ is to maintain credibility and fairness, Primetime Ltd must do everything possible to make sure that the quiz mistresses or mastershave the full and true complement of all the answers. So that if a school answers a question in any way, the answers in possession of the quiz mistress can her quickly truly whether the answer is right or wrong and whether that school deserves full marks or part of the marks.
Other schools have courses to complain about the way the NSMQ is being conducted. What a student wants, is to register good answers to questions and score points. If on the other hand they are failed when they actually gave the right answers, they could give up on education all together.
It is also about time to find out why most of the schools who are highly ranked by WAEC never get into the quarter-finals, semi-finals and finals of the NSMQ. If WAEC conducts examinations which cover the sciences, maths and the art subjects and certain schools could perform well, where are these good schools when it comes to only science and mathematics quizzes?
Hon Daniel Dugan
