Race against time: RBISE negligence puts college admissions at risk

Students yet to get result cards required for admissions .

RAWALPINDI:

The Rawalpindi Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (RBISE) has yet to provide result cards to students, despite the announcement of results more than a week ago.

Students and their parents are perturbed over the situation because the students cannot apply for admission in colleges without the result cards.

Muhammad Adnan, a student, told The Express Tribune on Sunday that all the federal and provincial colleges had announced the last dates of submission of admission forms but they could not apply because they had yet to receive their result cards.

He said that the admission forms had to be submitted between August 6 and 10. Adnan feared that he might not be able to get admission in the college of his choice because the dates for submission of forms were very close.

Muhammad Asif, the father of a student, said that the RBISE was displaying laxity in discharge of their duties. He said that it was the responsibility of the board to provide result cards to students in time, but the authorities were not ready to pay heed to the repeated requests from the parents. Asif said that the board was playing with the futures of students.

He said that even the administrations of various schools were not cooperating. Asif said that a student had to provide a character certificate along with the result card at the time of applying to a college. He said that it was the responsibility of school administrations to provide the certificate to students, adding that the administrations at many schools were on leave and they were not responding to their requests.

Asif said that relevant staff should be present in the schools to facilitate students.

He regretted that they had to go through so many hurdles despite the fact that their children were on merit and it was the legal right of their children to get admission in the college of their choice. “We are really frustrated,” Asif said.

Malik Shabbir, a resident of Cantt, said parents had to confront a number of other problems as well. He said that if a student was studying under the Rawalpindi board and wanted to get admission in a Federal college, he was asked to provide a residential certificate, a migration certificate along with the result card and a character certificate.

Shabbir said that the parents had to run from pillar-to-post to arrange all these documents. He said the authorities concerned did not cooperate at all at any stage, which was “quite unfair”. Shabbir said it took many days to arrange all the documents.

Taj Muhammad, father of a student, said the RBISE should immediately provide result cards to the students. He said that this negligence could result in a number of students failing to get admission at colleges of their choice in spite of scoring high marks.

Muhammad said that they did not believe in the “false claims” made by the officials concerned that the cards would be delivered soon. He claimed that the board authorities had not provided certificates to some students who appeared in the exams last year.

RBISE spokesperson Arsalan Cheema told The Express Tribune that the board had dispatched all the result cards to the students through post on Saturday. He said that the cards could not be delivered to the students because of Eid holidays. Cheema said that the students would start receiving their result cards from Monday. He said that the board had never displayed laxity and the cards were delivered every year immediately after the announcement of the result.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 4^th,2014.