Thousands of parents and their wards have trooped to the resolution centres across the country since Monday, September 7, 2026, seeking solutions to challenges arising from the 2026 SHS placement exercise.
Among the complaints confronting officials are those from parents whose wards missed out on their preferred schools despite obtaining good aggregates, while other students with lower grades secured admission into the same schools.
For these parents, the situation is difficult to understand.
They are therefore demanding that the schools their wards were given be changed to their preferred choices.
But officials of the Computerised School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) say placement is not determined by the aggregate alone.
Explaining the process to some aggrieved parents at the National Resolution Centre in Accra, a CSSPS official said although an aggregate 7 is evidently better than an aggregate 14, several other factors are considered during placement.
These include the programme a student chooses, the number of places a school has available for that programme and the number of students competing for those places.
The official explained that the system is programmed to work with the choices made by students and the spaces available in schools.
He cited the example of 80 students who all obtain an aggregate 7 and choose Science at the same school.
“If 80 students got aggregate 7 and all want to do Science at Aggrey Memorial, we put all of them in the system and see if they will all get placement there,” he said.
If the school has fewer places available for Science, however, not all 80 students can be admitted.
“We also ask the school how many students they need for each programme and let’s say the school says it wants 40 Science students and 80 Visual Arts students,” the official said.
In such a situation, the 80 students seeking the 40 Science places have to compete for the available spots and where they all have the same aggregate, the system uses their raw scores to determine who gets the available places.
“If all 80 students who want to do Science have an aggregate of 7, the system turns to use the raw scores of the students and selects the 40 with the best raw scores,” he explained.
This means a student with a good aggregate can still miss out on a particular school because of the programme they choose.
The same school could, however, admit a student with a higher aggregate if that student applied for a different programme with more available places.
“Someone might have gotten aggregate 14 and got placed at Aggrey Memorial while your ward with 7 didn’t get it. That could also be because the other person chose Home Economics or Visual Arts while your ward chose Science and the school had 80 spots for Visual Arts students,” he explained.
In that case, the difference is not necessarily that the student with aggregate 14 performed better.
The two students may simply have been competing for different programmes with different numbers of available places.
It is therefore possible for a student with aggregate 7 to miss out on a school while another student with aggregate 14 gets in, without the placement system necessarily having made an error.
For parents trying to understand the outcome of the placement exercise, the aggregate is only part of the picture. What each student selected and the competition for available spaces can also determine where they are placed.
