M M Jasim :Education Minister Nurul Islam Nahid on Saturday termed the admission test system of Dhaka University (DU) “faulty” and the DU authorities protested it strongly. The minister also urged the varsity authorities to reconsider the system. “The admission test system is “incomplete”. “It is not a test of passing or failure. It is a selection,” he said. “This selection system is faulty. And that’s why so many students came out unsuccessful,” he added. Asked about the ministry’s role into this, the minister said the DU authorities are the ones who would look after the matter. “We want the authorities to play a responsible role. Otherwise, we will have to change the related laws, which we don’t want to do,” the minister said.The minister’s comment came five days after the results in the DU’s ‘Kha’ unit admission test were published with a pass rate of 9.55 percent only. A total of 3,874 students passed the examination.Of the total 40,565 examinees, 22,000 failed in English and only two students qualified to be enrolled in the university’s English Department for the 2014-15 session, according to university sources.Vice-Chancellor Professor A A M S Arefin Siddique told the media that there is no scope to raise question about the admission test process of DU. “The admission test of DU is cent percent transparent. If anyone raises question it will be harmful for the next generation,” the VC said. DU academic council will decide that how they will take the admission test and what will be the process, Professor Arefin said. Professor Sadrul Amin, Dean of Arts Faculty, told The New Nation, “We do not know why the minister delivered derogatory speech about DU. It hurts us. We have transparency in admission test. We cannot take hold the admission test like Higher Secondary Certificate examination.” “It is high time to think about the quality of education in Bangladesh. Otherwise, we have to face some problems in future,” he said. Professor Farid Uddin Ahmed, Dean of Social Sciences Faculty and President of DU Teachers’ Association, told The New Nation, “Each and every examination in the country is held in a faulty way. We try to make the DU admission test transparent. The minister could suggest us if we have any problem in admission test process. But we will decide how the admission test holds.”This time, the university had made it compulsory for the applicants to obtain at least 15 marks in ‘Elective English’, apart from getting the usual 20 marks in the general English, to be enrolled in the department.Of the 40,565 examinees, only 1,364 took the ‘Elective English’ test.The English department is to enrol 150 students for the session, and 125 among them are to come from those who sat the ‘Kha’ unit tests under the Arts Faculty. The rest would be taken in from those who took the ‘Gha’ unit test. Nahid said the question of Dhaka University admission tests was intentionally made tough, therefore only two students could be eligible for the English Department among 166, 000 students.He said those who are making allegations of the degradation of the education standard, are unable to show evidence.
