Psyche of exam preparations: The three types of students sitting Matric exams today

As many as 300,000 students will appear for their exams

KARACHI: As many as 300,000 teenagers have buried their noses into their books as their world, for the time being at least, revolves around giving final touches to the preparations for their Matriculation exams.

Starting today (Tuesday), these students will appear for exams that will go on till April 21 at a total of 413 designated centres established at various schools, according to the schedule announced by the Board of Secondary Education Karachi (BSEK).

While finalising the arrangements for the exams, the BSEK examinations controller, Noman Ahsan, told The Express Tribune that at least 117 such schools that have to serve as exam centres have been declared ‘sensitive’. The board has asked the Sindh government to deploy Rangers and police personnel outside these schools mainly located in Lyari, Landhi, Orangi Town, Korangi, Baldia Town, Gadap and Bin Qasim Town.

For vigilance during the exams, Ahsan said that school principals will act as senior superintendents while 34 mobile vigilance teams will ensure the exams are conducted in a fair and transparent manner.

Studying 101

For these exams, the students as well as their mentors’ approach to ‘preparation’ is, however, diametrically opposite to the attitudes of those affiliated with the Cambridge International Examinations or even the Aga Khan University Examination Board.

While the latter urge students to gain a better understanding of the subject by employing modern knowledge-based assessment techniques, the exams carried out by the BSEK have very little to do with testing the students’ analytical skills in a three-hour time.

As a result, the more ambitious students busy themselves in perfecting their rote-learned answers through the ‘preparation notes’ provided by popular tuition centres.

The others who find cramming the bulk of these notes a daunting task go out to buy a handy combination of the last five years’ solved papers, along with the guess papers.

Prior to the exams each year, this second breed of matriculation students can be seen swarming in and out of bookshops situated across the city. “These two things are all that I need to pass my exams,” said a matriculation student confidentially who arrived at the Arsalan Books, Stationers and Gift Centre in Gulistan-e-Jauhar. “I know because I sat the exams of Class IX last year and I did not fail any course.”

There is, however, a third breed of students who do not even bother with the solved or guess papers. For them, the infamous pocket guides, which are an abridged version of solved papers, come in handy for copying answers during exams, provided that they do not get caught by the invigilator.

Many do realise that the pocket guides cannot bring them good marks due to the qualitatively poor content. To ‘address’ their reservations, the bookshops situated in residential areas also place Photostat machines with the facility to make micro copies — colloquially known as the pharra —  of preparation notes compiled by popular tuition centres. During exams, the students keep these ‘pharras’ safely with them, preferably in undergarments, and copy the content in answer script given the opportunity.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 7^th, 2015.