Too many public exams, too much of experiments

It was a day of celebrations and sadness. About 13 hundred thousand of about 15 hundred thousand students who took the school-final public examinations — Secondary School Certificate and equivalent — revelled at their success as the results were published on Saturday. The students who came out unsuccessful, in all likelihood, had a bad day, when they were by themselves, in family and in society.

Students scoring the highest grade point average of 5 numbered about one hundred and 12 thousand, which is a little more than 30 thousand less than the figure of the past year — a piece of sad news for the education minister. With this, the pass percentage also declined this year compared with that of the past year — by more than 4 points.

Many educationalists put the decline in this year’s results down to the introduction of ‘creative questions’ for mathematics, beginning this year. But what this matted-hair, long-nailed, wrinkled-face fairytale called creative question is that everyone dreads — student and their guardian or teacher — every time the textbook board has taken an initiative to introduce it to different classes gradually.

‘Creative question’ is the Bangladeshi name for what is known as structured or graded question by way of which, as modern educationists think, students of different calibre could be assessed more accurately. Every graded or structured question has four segments to test student’s skills such as cognitive, analytical, application and higher ability.

As all the skills being present in all the students to equal force is far above average, only certain per cent of students, say 5 or 10, can answer all the segments. And as the textbooks do not have any sample questions on the segments, only students studying the books thoroughly can answer all the segments properly.

Marks are, however, assigned to the segments and students are given marks based on correct answers they give to the segments. This structured question system, introduced in 2010, was first thought and spoken of to be helping students from poor and destitute families in rural areas fare better in examinations. But, in effect, it is reported to have been introduced to put the curriculum, which was changed in the mid-1990s with the focus more on skills and values, in step with the examinations system, which had not been changed by then.

The out-of-phase examinations system, which was based solely on the syllabus and not the curriculum, was set right, experimentally though; the structured questions were introduced for one or a few subjects at a time and not for all public examinations in one go. This was introduced for the 2012 exams of the Junior School Certificate, the fourth public examinations after the examinations of the Secondary School Certificate and the Higher Secondary Certificate and the Primary Education Completion.

The examinations of the Secondary School Certificate, after 10 years of schooling, and the Higher Secondary Certificate, after two more years of education, usually in colleges, have been around for a long time. In 2009, the government introduced the unofficial public examinations of the Primary Education Completion, held not under the boards of intermediate and secondary education but coordinated by the government’s education officers. When this was introduced, the government said that it was introduced to take stock of the students who were completing primary education of five years. The excuse was lame as the government did not need to spend so much money on just being able to know the number of students successfully completing primary education.

The Primary Education Completion examinations replaced the class-final examinations, and the primary scholarship examinations, but the process only burdened students at an age they start understanding that they need to study to know the working of the world. But in the first holding of the JSC and PEC examinations, probably because of lenient evaluation as being the first time, success went overboard, much to the smile, and the so-called pride, of the parents and guardians.

Banking on the apparent success of the Primary Education Completion examinations, managers of national education then decided to introduce JSC examinations, and Junior Dakhil Certificate examinations in the case of madrassah education, after the eighth year of schooling or three years after primary education, replacing the class-final and junior scholarship examinations.

It again relieved a few students, who qualified for the junior scholarship examinations based on their half-yearly examinations, of taking another examination after the one they needed to take for promotion to the next class. The JSC or JDC examinations set in, in 2010, with four public examinations spaced out throughout 12 years of schooling that accounts for primary, secondary and higher secondary education in Bangladesh.

While mangers of national education dispensed with the additional examinations for scholarship, they made two local, class-final examinations public. All this only kept burdening students, leaving them with little space for real learning and goading them on to become prepared for public examinations, one after another. With guardians, believing that results of all public examinations matter, standing over the shoulders at home and teachers doing the same in schools, the students had a life ‘full of care’ so early on with ‘no time to stand and stare.’

With students being sandwiched between examinations, real learning declined, as was evident in the admission tests for tertiary education, in public or private universities or specialised areas such as medical education and engineering. Education managers suddenly found that the syllabus, which is a descriptive outline and summary of topics covered in a course, was not in synch with the curriculum, which is a prescriptive set of courses and their contents that requires students to understand them at the end of the course to attain certain standard. The managers woke up, set up committees and came up with ‘creative questions’ — with the focus separately on cognitive (knowledge), analytical (understanding), application and higher ability.

Education managers in 2008 decided on the introduction of structured questions for the 2010 SSC examinees; the same batch of students faced the structured question in the HSC examinations of 2012. The managers decided in 2009 introduced the system for students who would be taking primary education completion examinations in 2013 and in 2010 for students taking JSC/JDC examinations in 2012.

This system of structured question, which gave education mangers hopes for better learning of the students by reducing their tendency to learn by rote, remained as dreaded as the communicative language teaching that was introduced for English in 1998–1999. We saw reports on teachers and students, along with their guardians, being confused hogging the headlines then for the CLT method and now for the structured questions.

It was reported a year ago (New Age, May 25, 2014) that a half of the school teachers cannot set questions in keeping with the structured question system; this very well means that other teachers do not have a clear understanding of the system; and it could also very well mean that the managers introduced the system, as they did with the CLT method, without arranging for adequate training the teachers — the cart is put before the horse.

The objective of the introduction of the structured system was, as one of the proponents who several times went on television saying this, to drop the number of public examinations so that students can have care-free time, when they would not need to run the race for results, for real learning. The number of public examinations could be dropped to only one, say after 10 years of schooling, which would decide the course for higher, or tertiary, education of the students. But this did not happen, many think, mainly because of the initial hype about the first holding of the JSC and the PEC examinations.

The managers probably, again some people think, thought that people, falsely taking pride in the PEC and JSC results of their children believing that they would matter later in their lives, could be made to believe that such successes at the early age were indicators of development and, therefore, important. The structured system set in, as did four public examinations, continuing to strain the academic life of the children since their young age.

Since the mid-1990s, when the curriculum changed after a long period, the examinations and evaluation process have continued to be much of an experiment. The education minister the day he announced results of this year’s SSC and equivalent madrassah and vocational examinations said that they were concerned about the multiple-choice questions, indicating that the volume of MCQs could be reduced or MCQs could entirely be dropped.

The MCQs, first introduced to secondary students in the early 1990s, then highly praised and termed to be what could reduce rote learning and ensure thorough study of textbooks, has now come to be criticised almost evenly by educationists. While some say that MCQs were the proper way to evaluate students, some have come up with the opinions that MCQs have only encouraged teachers to get involved in corruption and the examinations halls to become centres of corruption. Some educationists, however, view such corruption as nothing more than an administrative failure. They, instead, hold brief for a better examination management system.

The publication of the list of best schools, within the boards of education and among them, has come to be criticised. The minister that day said that the boards would long longer publish such lists, separate or combined, as, many think, such list or lists only encourage schools and guardians to get involved in an unholy competition. But if the competition is not there among the schools, there could be less space for improvement in school management. Why cannot the relevant authorities take action against such corruption? Corruption, after all, is no spectre like Hamlet’s father.

This could also be viewed as an administrative failure and the decision to drop making such lists as a cover-up to hide the administrative failure. Such lists also bring up the disparity that exists between schools located in rural and urban areas. Although two-thirds of the secondary schools are located in rural areas, only five of them could earn their places in the best 80 schools, drawn 10 each from eight general education boards, this year. This shows that the initial investments and the running capital flow into two directions, without any balance or even the semblance of a balance across the rural-urban divide. If there is no such list in the future, no one will get to know whether the disparity is widening and there will be no hullabaloo about this. Managers of national education have increasingly been saying, for a little less than a decade, that the loopholes have been plugged and that the disparity has been removed. The combined list of performing schools does not prove this.

National education — especially the primary and the secondary, the blocks that build the foundation for further education — is embroiled in experimentation, flaws, inefficiency and even corruption. Will the managers be willing to set things right in a proper way? Will they invest a little on education research so that education can be imparted on students in a better way?

Akkas, Abu Jar M, (2014 June 4) Too many public exams, too much of experiments, New Age. 8

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