THE results of the HSC examinations this year showed a significant decrease in the number of GPA-5 scorers in contrast to a rather steady rise in the past three years. News report said a total of 744891 students passed out this year and the average success rate is 74.30 percent, which is 4.37 percentage point lower than the 78.67 percent last year. The huge number of pass outs, albeit lower than last year, has thus brought forward the biggest challenge of how to give the candidates seats for admission in the colleges and universities. The country's 31 public universities have a combined total of 42,000 seats including 3040 seats for medical students and 1000 seats at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). Another statistic revealed that a total of 58,197 students have scored GPA-5 this year and it means that not all of them will have a chance to attend public universities. One more figure suggests that the total number of available seats for admission this year including the colleges under the National University and private universities stood at 142,400 and it means that a total of 102,491 students will have no seat at all to pursue higher studies.
Looking back at this year's results, it appears that the number of GPA scorers fell short by 2,965 from last year and moreover; the percentage of successful girl students has also decreased by 8.9 percent to 70.29 percent this year. Girls had performed better in the past several years and the reverse is a cause of anxiety. Another cause of anxiety arises from the urban-rural disparity in students success rates. Examinees of the urban-based colleges produced better results while the rural colleges have no place in the name of better performing institutions and the percentage of their failed students are also much higher compared to urban-based colleges.
There may be many reasons to give inputs for a sociological analysis as to why the rural colleges performed worse and why the overall results this year proved a setback compared to recent years. But the government leaders made no delay in directing the blames on BNP and Jamaat-E-Islami for calling repeated hartals early this year coinciding with the HSC examination period. The education minister said had there been no shut down, students would have had uninterrupted preparations. Hartals left a tremendous pressure on their mind and it is primarily to be blamed. The minister however did not give any points as to why girl students and rural based students produced poor results. Many people tend to believe that the government gave approval to many new colleges in the countryside on political considerations as the local MPs and ruling party leaders wanted to create such institutions to their advantage. Though the government granted MPOs and such financial benefits to teachers in hastily set up colleges, the quality of teachers as well as the number of teachers in those colleges were not enough to create good results. Moreover, the high percentage of success in public examinations including JSC, SSC and HSC has been widely criticised as being a populist outlook of the government to show tremendous success at all levels of education. This has backfired. Another criticism is that the creative questioning system is not working well among average students. Parents in the urban areas spend a lot of money on private tuition to secure success of their children but rural students are not having such scope to compete with urban students. We believe the examination system as well as the admission system must be properly reviewed and must be segregated from any political considerations.