Aga Khan Board sets up Lahore office

LAHORE: The Aga Khan University Examination Board (AKU-EB) has set up an office in Lahore in view of the increasing number of enrolments from the city.

It has also started developing its own syllabus for Class VIII, Tabassum Rana, the AKU-EB Lahore manager told The Express Tribune on Friday.

She said that so far around 400 candidates from the city had passed their Secondary School Certificate (SSCs) and Higher Secondary School Certificate (HSSCs) under the AKU-EB.

This, Ms Rana said, was very encouraging. She added that the decision to set up an office was taken after an increasing number of private schools from the Punjab started approaching the board for affiliation.

She said that earlier students and affiliated schools used to correspond with the AKU-EB through internet. “Since the beginning of 2010 they started pressing us to set up an office,” she said, “The AKU-EB started paperwork for the project in April and the office was established in August.”

“The AKU-EB’s primary purpose is to help improve the standards of education,” Ms Rana said, adding that it would achieve it by setting up a credible examination system. The AKU-EB has adopted latest methods to mark examination papers in a bid to make the process transparent. “The only way to earn students’ trust is to ensure that the marking system is transparent,” she said.

She said that the AKU-EB was using an electronic-marking system. Though e-marking was the international standard for multiple choice questions (MCQs), the AKU-EB, she said, was among the four examination boards in the world using it for constructed-response answers as well. “Answers are scanned into a computer and a separate image is created for each candidate’s answer without any identifier. This removes any means of tracking the answer to the candidate.”

On a query about the AKU-EB’s recognition by the higher education institutes, she said that there were several misconceptions that needed to be corrected.

“Students with AKU-EB SSC and HSSC certificates stand an equal chance of admission in all higher-education institutes of the country,” she said. She rejected that the AKU-EB graduates needed an equivalence certificate from the Inter Board Committee of Chairmen (IBCC).

The Higher Education Commission (HEC) has informed the universities that the AKU-EB candidates were eligible for admission, she said.

She said that about 9,000 students had so far passed SSC and HSSC certificates under the AKU-EB. They, she added, had been getting admission in some of the top universities in the country.

Compared to other external examination systems the AKU-EB charged less, she added.

She said that several schools, currently affiliated with the Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISE) Lahore, have decided to seek affiliation with the AKU-EB for the next academic year.

About the preparation of the Class VIII syllabus, she said that the AKU-EB Lahore and Karachi offices have simultaneously organised three-day material development workshops. These workshops, from Sept 3 to Sept 5, will be attended by teachers from various public and private schools, she added.

The Lahore workshop will prepare social science and English syllabi and the Karachi workshop mathematics, Urdu and children’s science syllabi.

The AKU-EB was founded in August 2003 under the Ordinance CXIV of the Government of Pakistan. It offers examination services for SSC and HSSC in both English and Urdu medium. The syllabus followed by the AKU-EB is devised under the framework of the Pakistan National Curriculum.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 4^th, 2010.