BECE Mathematics Tips: How to Score High in 2027

If you are in JHS 3, Mathematics is the one subject you cannot afford to treat lightly. It is a core subject in your BECE aggregate, and reports from the school placement coordinator in September 2026 say candidates who fail English Language or Mathematics do not qualify for placement into senior high school. The good news is that BECE Mathematics is a very predictable paper, and predictable papers reward steady practice.

This guide is built from WAEC Ghana's own BECE regulations booklet, which sets out the structure of the paper and includes sample questions. It is not a promise of what will appear on your paper, and nobody can honestly give you that.

How the paper is built

According to the WAEC booklet (the version that applies from 2024), BECE Mathematics has two papers.

Do the sums and you can plan your time. In Paper 1 you have 90 seconds per question on average. In Paper 2 the sample paper shows each question worth 15 marks, so four questions give you the 60 marks, and you have about 15 minutes for each.

Remember too that your final BECE result combines your school's continuous assessment (30%) with the external examination (70%). That is another reason to treat every class test in JHS 3 seriously.

What the sample questions tell you to revise

WAEC's sample paper is not a forecast, but it shows the range of topics the examiners consider fair game. It touches these areas:

• Rounding numbers and writing answers in standard form
• Fractions, ratio, percentages and sharing in a given ratio
• Sets and subsets
• Solving linear equations
• Angles with parallel lines and a transversal
• Right-angled triangles and trigonometric ratios, plus surds
• Linear inequalities from a graph
• Vectors
• Probability, including a fair coin and a fair die
• Statistics: range, median and mean

Print your own checklist from that list and tick each topic only when you can do three different questions on it without looking at your notes. That is a much better test than "I read the chapter".

A practical plan for the months before the exam

Start with the topics that carry the most easy marks. Fractions, percentages, ratio, simple equations and basic statistics are where careful candidates collect marks. Geometry and trigonometry are next. Leave vectors and inequalities for when the basics are solid, but do not skip them.

Work from questions, not from notes. Read a worked example once, then close the book and try a similar one. If you get stuck, go back to the example, find the step you missed, and write it in a small "mistakes" notebook. Revisit that notebook every Sunday.

Practise Paper 1 against the clock. Set a timer for one hour and do 40 questions. Mark yourself honestly. If you keep running out of time, you are probably spending too long on a hard question early on. Move on, put a mark next to it, and come back.

Practise Paper 2 by writing full solutions. Write out every step, including the formula you are using and the units in your answer. If your final answer is wrong, clear working still shows your teacher (and the examiner) what you understood. Choose the four questions you are most comfortable with first, then check that you have not read the instruction wrongly.

An original example to try

Here is a type of question that fits the percentage and ratio topics (this is our own example, not from any exam):

A shopkeeper in Tamale sells a bag of rice for GH¢480 and makes a profit of 20% on the cost price. What was the cost price?

Think before you read on. A 20% profit means the selling price is 120% of the cost price, so the cost price is 480 divided by 1.2, which is GH¢400. Notice the common trap: taking 20% of 480 and subtracting it gives the wrong answer, because the profit is calculated on the cost price, not on the selling price.

Exam-week habits that protect your marks

• Read each question twice. Many lost marks come from answering a slightly different question from the one asked.
• In Paper 1, shade your answer carefully and check that the number on your answer sheet matches the question number.
• Answer every Paper 1 question. If you are unsure, cross out the options you know are wrong and pick the most likely of the rest.
• Keep a few minutes at the end to re-check arithmetic in Paper 2.
• Sleep. A tired mind makes silly subtraction errors.

For more on revision routines, read our guides on how to study effectively and how to make a reading timetable. To understand how your Mathematics grade feeds into school placement, see our explainer on the BECE grading system, and check the BECE 2027 timetable for Ghana so you know how many weeks you have left.

Where to practise

ExamPadi does not have BECE or Ghana-specific practice questions yet, and we would rather say so plainly than pretend. In the meantime, work through the sample questions in WAEC's own booklet, your textbook exercises, and the class tests from your teacher. If you want to hear from us when BECE practice is ready, leave your interest on the download page. Confirm exam dates, paper formats and rules on the official WAEC Ghana site (waecgh.org) and with your school; the sources used here are dated 2024 to 2026 and can change.