Examining exams
Sunday, April 06, 2014
From Print Edition
The News

School, college or university level examinations may bring with them some level of anxiety for the pupils involved – but rarely do they, in other countries, turn into major crime control exercises. This has been seen in Karachi where 325,000 students are appearing for the Board of Secondary Education Karachi exams. As these annual matriculation tests got underway, section 144 was imposed around the 295 centers being used for them and paramilitary soldiers deployed around 33 declared ‘highly sensitive’ in a bid to prevent rampant cheating and fears that armed persons could break into centers to facilitate this exercise for some candidates.

As had already been feared there was large scale mismanagement. On Thursday hundreds of students at a Korangi government school staged a protest over being unable to sit the exam, apparently because the school administration had failed to submit the required paperwork. Pupils and their parents say this threatens their future. Similar issues involving form entries and the issuance of ‘admit’ cards to students have surfaced elsewhere, with one principal booked for fraud, a teacher attempting suicide and students pelting the Board offices. All this reflects the state of our education. The Senior Education Minister for Sindh Nisar Khuhro had already visited centers to look into mismanagement, but it does not seem his intervention has done much good. It is also uncertain how effective the reporting center set up at the board office will be. Simply speaking, the situation is absurd. It is not possible to stop cheating in examinations involving tens of thousands of candidates through policing measures alone. The fact that wrongdoing is so rampant reflects the moral bankruptcy of our society. Plagiarism is of course also a common offence. We need to recognize that, right from the most elementary levels, schooling must involve more than the teaching of letters, figures and texts. Values and ethics need to fit in somewhere as well. However, since injecting morality back into a society cannot be achieved instantaneously, especially since cheating is now regarded virtually ‘acceptable’ at many levels, it is important also to think of other, more innovative measures to stop it. One would be to simply move away from exams based on rote to those that require more original input from pupils, making cheating far harder and encouraging the thinking skills our education system has lost. This will not be an easy task given the many weaknesses that exist within it. But a remedy is necessary to break away from the existing sights of police and Rangers patrolling examination centers.