Many have been upset with this year’s HSC pas rate being around 86 per cent. It’s the lowest among the last couple of years.
Yet, many colleges have attained cent per cent pass rate while a notable amount of students have had the honour of receiving GPA-5.
This obviously is a delightful side. But, we see the opposite image alongside that as well.
According to Prothom Alo news, not even a single student from 50 higher secondary level educational institutions across the country could pass the HSC and equivalent exams this year.
Last year, there were 5 such educational institutions. It went from 5 to 50 within just a year.
How acute the level of degradation is, can easily be predicted. Many would say that 50 out of thousands of colleges aren’t that many. But it makes one shudder to think of the future of who sat for the exam from these colleges.
What’s more astonishing is that not just the colleges from remote villages, there are colleges even from the capital among the educational institutes with zero pass rate.
Inter-Education Board Coordination Committee’s information on the result says, 44 of the educational institutes with zero pass rate fall under the nine general education boards.
Of them, 13 colleges are under Dinajpur education board, 9 under Rajshahi board, 8 under Dhaka board, 6 under Jashore board, 5 under Comilla board and 3 under Mymensingh board.
On the other hand, no students from four madrasahs under the madrasah education board and two educational institutes under the technical education board could pass the exam.
The question of how the educational institutes, from which not even a single student could pass, gained curricular and academic recognition arises naturally.
The secondary and higher secondary education board provides educational institutes with curricular and academic recognition after evaluating their educational programme. Are they performing that task responsibly or under the influence of certain individuals and groups?
Then again, even after an educational institute has received the recognition once, the education board is also responsible for monitoring if there are appropriate infrastructure and skilled educators to run the curriculum or not.
The incident of so many colleges having a zero pass rate proves that they haven’t done that job properly. The work has been on the paper but not in reality.
Educational programmes are a matter of intensive care. There’s no scope for any break or negligence there. Many establish educational institutes with a commercial mindset in the country. But that business cannot obviously run excluding education.
Dhaka education board chairman Tapan Kumar Sarkar told Prothom Alo there’s no scope of opening an educational institute without having own land and infrastructure. But the college in Malibagh, from which no student could pass this year, is running from a rented house.
The question is how did that college manage to get approval? There’s no record of how many educational institutes throughout the country are receiving approval and running under the noses of the authorities like this.
No one has the right to play games with students’ lives. We’ll hope that the academic recognition of the educational institutes that don’t even have the minimum facilities to run curricular programme or necessary educators and educational equipment, will be suspended or revoked.
If necessary, arrangements have to be made for the students of those educational institutes to be admitted somewhere else. Those who are destroying students’ future, have to be brought under justice and be held accountable.