Sabuj Bhattacharjee :
The coronavirus has not only harmed us physically and financially but has pushed the world of education backward for decades. Due to the outbreak of the coronavirus, there has been a kind of turmoil in the decision making of the Ministry of Education at every moment. Amid more than one proposal and dilemma in every decision-making, it has become a normal thing for the public to have some strange and seemingly good decisions at the eleventh hour. As a result, on October 7, the Ministry of Education of Bangladesh decided to auto-promote the HSC candidates.
The subject seemed to me to be “descending ghost from the neck”. Through this decision, we are providing future generations with unexpected and incompetent citizens. Those who may be appointed to high positions in important workplaces of the country with the help of nepotism ( like family or political power) and will continue to work for the country in the future. Therefore, I strongly believe that it is the demand of the present time to take measures to separate the eligible and ineligible students from the students who have received this auto-promotion and send them to the next level of education in the future which will save the country from backwardness.
According to the conventional rules, each of our public universities admits the students through their own question structure and rules and regulations. But the question raises about the next students who will be selected in various subjects under the National University and will later take their higher education and who will be admitted to different private universities.
According to the University Grants Commission of Bangladesh, there are 45 public universities in Bangladesh and 92 privately owned universities. Most privately-owned universities admit relatively ineligible students for higher education. In this case, the question maybe if the Board of Secondary Education can give them an HSC pass certificate to be promoted to the next level, why they can not admit them. In that case, those universities can be told that getting an HSC certificate does not mean that they can study any subject later. Because comparing the mental perfection and thinking ability of eighth and tenth-grade students with twelfth-grade students can be a huge mistake. Most students change the standard of their studies after the SSC exam and return to a much better state from their previous state. So as an ordinary citizen, allocating certain marks in the public university admission test based on the results of the eighth and tenth class and admission in the national university is a completely wrong decision.
Therefore a university entrance ability verification test should be taken on a government initiative to prove eligibility for university admission. Students who fail the exam will not be able to get admission to any of the registered universities of the country and later they will be able to get admission to the university by proving themselves eligible by participating in the exams again. If this happens then the number of unemployed in the country may increase but the country will get relief from a group of incompetent workers and citizens of the future. Therefore, I think that even if the students are given auto-promotion in the face of an epidemic, their eligibility for higher education should be verified for the good of the country. Because only the defeated king and the subjugated kingdom can tell how wrong it is to send an incompetent warrior to the battlefield by declaring him worthy.
(Mr. Bhattacharjee is an Editor, Troimasik Ushabarta)
