Education boards: Intermediate students protest automation hiccups

Gujranwala board office vandalised; Chairman says rechecking requests will now be processed free of charge.

GUJRANWALA:

Intermediate students in several cities on Thursday staged protest demonstrations against an online system of registration and announcement of results.

In Gujranwala, protestors vandalised the Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISE) office. Hundreds of students who had gathered at the Sialkot Road bypass around 11am pelted the office building with stones and broke several windows.

The protestors later also broke into the Secrecy Branch and threw out dozens of files. Board officials said the protestors also tried to set the office on fire but were stopped by police who had been called to the scene after some of the protestors resorted to violence.

The protest ended at around 3:30pm after a meeting between BISE chairman Bashir Mehr and a six-member delegation of students. The students were told that rechecking of the disputed tests would be without charging any fee. The board had earlier charged Rs700 for every rechecking request. Several students, however, told the media that they would hold a similar protest on Friday (today) because the chairman had failed to address their concerns about the online system.

Three, earlier, attempts by the board officials to persuade the students into negotiating and ending the demonstration had remained unsuccessful.

Several protestors told The Express Tribune that the online system adopted by education boards in the province from this year had caused severe inconvenience to students. A student from Punjab College of Commerce said he had been given 55 marks in his Islamiat exam out of 50.

A Sialkot student said that her marks had been changed after each of her six re-checking applications. She said her marks now were significantly higher than what she had been awarded originally.

GBISE chairman Mehr said some mistakes in compilation of results were expected as it was for the first time everything from registration to announcement of results was done on-line. He said these glitches should not be seen as a sign that an online system could not succeed.

He said the online system’s maintenance team had briefed him on all aspects before the launch.

Other officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that the chairman was the only board official briefed. They said none of the officials who had to use the system in the registration and the result announcement process were given any briefing by the maintenance team. In Gujrat, students gathered at Fawara Chowk on near GT Road and in Faisalabad at Khurarianwala Chowk and staged demonstrations against the online system.

They said the results had been announced by the board on September 10 but they were still not sure whether or not these were the final results. They demanded that the online system be abandoned and the old system of registration and announcement of results be restored.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 21^st, 2011.