SSC results under Ctg Board

Two thirds of the candidates have failed, and under Chittagong Board the percentage of pass was only 35.12 (and the nation's 36 per cent), which means out of 68,502 candidates only 24061 have passed.

What happens to the unsuccessful candidates, and their guardians, is a big national question that should be immediately addressed.

For long we have been criticising our educational system, as it is based not on a pursuit of knowledge but on a pursuit of marks. And in the present grade-point-average (GPA) system it can be considered as a pursuit of grades because the past fascination for merit list is now replaced by another equally negative notion-- the GPA 5.

The tendency, therefore, has been to render teaching not in order to help the students grow their understanding about life and the world but to make them depend more solely on the retention power of their memory, so that they can regurgitate their learning in the examination hall. This has been done consistently and systematically destroying the original thinking and creative powers of the students.

For over many decades now this primarily memory-based competitive pattern has been the focus of our national curriculum at the school, college, university, and superior-service examination levels, and the outcome is nothing short of a national disaster.

In the present context of the global pressure for modernisation, our best products seem to be not good enough to meet the needs of the country. Our professionals, the very best of them, have been proved on many occasions to be failing in their jobs. This legacy of producing bodies of incompetent students is still continuing.

Incompetence does not, however, grow alone, with it the accompanying vices follow laziness, inertia, cheating on duty, unaccountability, falsifying, forgery, nepotism, group politics, aggression, verbosity, and high-handedness, to name only some.

There must be a philosophy of education, the bottom line of which should be that students come to the school to understand and not to memorise. Another part of this is that they come to the school not to fail, but to pass, yes, all of them.

As an experiment, the sitting examination requirement may be totally withdrawn from the examination system, because it is the root of all miss-education. Let a student be graded every week, every month in his respective school on the basis of his class attendance, class performance and written assignments and let the accumulated grades of the year be his final result for promotion to the next class. This will reduce the percentage of unsuccessful students to a large degree.

Let this national mayhem of our young students in the name of S.S.C., H.S.C., and Degree Pass be at once stopped. It is a headache, not a matter of pride that so many students every year should fail.

The educational environment in schools, the quality of teaching, students' access to knowledge, and freeing educational governance from party politics are areas awaiting action.