THE eight-year low success rate in this year’s HSC examinations has stumbled the nation and scores of students who were hoping for impressive performance in this year’s result are now hovering in deep frustration. For the depressed pass rate and GPA-5 scorers, the government blamed political unrest during the examinations as the only cause, although Education Board officials pointed to introduction of creative questions, new method of question selection and lack of flexibility among teachers in examining answer scripts as major causes of setback. The pejorative results hurt many to wonder why the government was not much bothered this year to ask Board Officials and their examiners, unlike in the past years, to give liberal pass marks to students to show its high success rates in public examinations. Moreover, the prompt blame on the political unrest from the highest level of the government as a cause of poor performance has made the issue more political rather seeking the cause of the government failure to run the education system properly. Many hold the view that students were not properly prepared with creative question-answers method and teachers’ indifference in teaching and their indulgence in political matters contributed to poor quality in teaching.
News report said the pass rate fell around 10 percentage points to 65.84 percent from last year’s 75.74 percent in all the eight general Education Boards and 34,721 students got GPA-5 compared to last year’s 57,789. It is shocking and it shows a visible break with earlier trend without clear answers how the nosedive happened. The number of unsuccessful students and institutions with zero pass rate rose while that of colleges with 100 percent pass rate came down. Several Board Chairmen said poor marks in English, Bangla, Physics and Information, Communication Technology are the reasons for poor results.
They also said students were not able to benefit from question leakages which left the number of poorly performing students on the high. But it is also true that questions were leaked in this HSC exams. Dhaka Education Board Chairman said students have failed to understand questions this year because of their changed nature. Moreover, students from rural colleges poorly performed than from urban centers because of quality gap and change in the nature of questions.
In our view the government may have many reasons to explain but the poor results of student invariably show the government’s failure to properly run education sector and prepare students to achieve better results. Many students feel devastated now as they saw the incidents of liberal pass out in the past.
