Key indicators of the HSC examination results published yesterday are showing that students – whose schedules have been put in disarray by political unrest – have performed poorly this year.
Pass rate and the number of students achieving the highest grade point both mark a decline following last few years’ upward trend.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and Education Minister Nurul Islam Nahid both said the results would have been much better had the BNP-Jamaat-led alliance not enforced violent blockades and hartals during the exams earlier this year.
This year, the Higher Secondary Certificate (SSC) and equivalent examinations registered a 69.6% pass rate – lowest since 2008 – compared to last year’s 78.33%.
The number of students achieving the best result – Grade Point Average 5, better known as GPA 5 – also dropped drastically to 42,894, which is the lowest since 2012. Last year, as many as 70,602 students ended up getting GPA 5.
As per tradition, minister Nahid, along with the chairmen of all the education boards, went to the PM’s residence Ganabhaban and handed the results over to her around 10am yesterday. The detailed results were officially made public in a media briefing at the Secretariat at 1pm.
“It is a matter of regret that the BNP-Jamaat clique was engaged in committing heinous crimes like burning people to death and torching and vandalising public and private property by calling hartals and blockades during the SSC and HSC examinations,” said Sheikh Hasina.
“Had they not unleashed such suicidal acts, the overall results of this year’s HSC and equivalent examinations would have been much better,” she added.
Nahid said keeping colleges open for extra classes to finish syllabus was tough because of the political unrest. Students could not make proper preparation either. These are the main reasons behind the poor result.
“We brought small changes to the question papers to promote creative writing and prevent question leak … These also had affected the pass rate a little bit,” Nahid said.
This year, a total of 1,061,614 students from 8,294 educational institutions from across the country appeared in 2,420 examination centres. Among them, 738,872 passed.
A total of 1,133 educational institutions recorded 100% pass rate, which was 1,147 last year. No students from 35 institutions passed the exams; last year this number was 24.
This year, girls – with 70.23% pass rate – were slightly better than boys, who registered 69.04% success. However, boys were better in terms of GPA 5 with 23,293 of them doing the best result, compared to 19,601 from among girls.
The combined pass rate of the eight general education boards is 65.84%, which was 75.74% last year. A total of 34,721 students scored GPA 5 under this category, which was 57,789 last year.
Under the general education category, students from Rajshahi recorded the highest pass rate of 80.67%. With 46.45% pass rate, Jessore was the worst performing board.
Like previous years, students with science and home economics major have done the best results registering 77.66% pass rate and 26,556 GPA 5s. Students from the business studies group come in next with 71.9% success rate and 5,722 scoring the highest GPA. Last comes the humanities major students, as usual, with 57.99% passing and 2,443 scoring GPA 5.
Compared to the general education boards, the Madrasa board performed better, registering 90.19% pass rate, which was an even more impressive 94.08% last year. However, the number of madrasa students scoring GPA 5 has fallen drastically to only 1,435 compared to the previous year’s 6,025.
The technical education board has somewhat maintained last year’s performance; this year, 85.58% students passed compared to last years 85.02%. The number of students scoring the highest GPA – 6,393 – has also been just a shade lower than last year’s 6,430.
A total of 236 students appeared in the examinations in five overseas centres. Among them, 212 passed and 17 students secured the highest grade.