Education on hold: Six months on, class IX students await results

Board of secondary education has yet to announce results for exams held in April.

KARACHI:

For class IX students the wait has been agonising. And so has been for their parents and teachers.

Six months ago, over 160,000 students sat for the Secondary School Certificate Part-1 examinations. But midway through October, the Board of Secondary Education Karachi (BSEK) has yet to announce their results.

With their next examinations (Matriculation) only a few months away, the board is still not in a position to issue the results any time soon. “The board will not be able to announce class IX results before November,” BSEK secretary Hoor Mazhar told The Express Tribune.

Despite being “provisionally” promoted to class X, these students are anxiously waiting for the results on the basis of which they would either be retained in Matric or would be reverted to the previous grade.

For the past many years, this delay in the announcement of class IX results has been extremely frustrating for the students as well as their parents. The situation is also creating problems for the school administrations.

Zubair Ahmed is one of the many such administrators. He manages the Herald City School in Gulistan-e-Jauhar.  “It’s been a month and a half into the academic year and we still don’t know how many of our students have passed or failed the exams,” he said. “If the secondary board announces the results in November, the students will not be mentally prepared to retake the papers.”

Although the BSEK does not bar students to sit in Matric exams even if they fail all class IX papers, most schools do not promote students if they fail two or three of the five subjects.

In the current situation, the schools have, however, no other option but to allow the enrolled students to “conditionally” attend Matric classes. Once their mark-sheets are issued by the board hopefully in November, each school will then decide the fate of the failures according to their rules. At most reputed schools, the students who perform badly are reverted to their previous class.

The parents of the students see the delay in results as an injustice. “When my son has already spent half of the academic year in class X, why he should be punished for the fault in the system,” said Nabeela Farooq, whose son studies at National High School in Gulshan-e-Iqbal.

Reasons for delay

Rather than relying on computers only, the board has revived an old practice of keeping manual registers to tabulate results. “The registers were discontinued at least 10 years ago [for computerised results] but the practice was giving way to corruption and tampering,” the secondary board secretary, Hoor Mazhar, told The Express Tribune.

This year, the board will initially prepare manual tabulation registers and the data will then be fed in computers. “This will allow us to double check the results in case any marks are tampered in computers,” she said.

For this reason, said the BSEK secretary, the board has not been able to compile the results of class IX. “Last year, the results were announced in October and one-month delay should be acceptable this year if it is for a good purpose.”

This is the fourth consecutive year that class IX results have been delayed without any justification, claims the Private Schools Management Association president, Sharfuz Zaman. “Ideally, the BSEK should announce the results by the first week of September.”

Published in The Express Tribune, October 17^th, 2012.