THE girls have outshined boys in all indicators in the two biggest public examinations PEC and JSC. The girls are well ahead of their counterpart, which shows a strong indication of girls’ enrolment in education, equal status, and their possible participation in future economic activities. The success of girls in education is a sure outcome of the government’s continuous support to primary education, monthly stipend, free textbooks, free tiffin and other facilities.
The pass rate in primary terminal exam rose to 97.59 per cent, up by 2.41 per cent from that of last year’s 95.18 per cent. Similarly, the number of GPA-5 achievers rose significantly. In the JSC examination, the pass rate is also 2.18 per cent higher than last year. However, there was a fall in the number of GPA-5 achievers this year, which dropped to 66,108 from last year’s 184,397 as the ministry decided to exclude the fourth subject in the main results.
Not only in PEC and JSC level, we have observed that, like the past two years, girls outshone the boys in this year’s HSC and equivalent examinations in terms of pass rate. In all 10 education boards – eight general, one madrasa, and one technical – the success rate in HSC among girls was 69.72 per cent, 5.84 per cent higher than the boys’ 63.88 per cent. The performance of the girls at these levels is expected, and we do welcome them. But the girls face dilemma at higher education due to early marriage, poverty and other social complications.
Girls are much better than boys at working together to solve problems, according to the first OECD (The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) assessment of collaborative problem solving that revealed last year. The situation is same in top-performing countries in PISA, like Japan, Korea and Singapore in Asia, Estonia and Finland in Europe, and Canada in North America. It was seen that girls do better than boys in every country and economy.
We see, the trend is also the same in Bangladesh. But it also indicates that boys are less attentive to their studies. If the boys become less educated than the girls, it will supply less qualified workforce to the economic development process.
