KARACHI: The present education system, especially the examination policy and methods, required urgent corrective steps to make it an effective and credible tool of disseminating the latest world knowledge by promoting competence and real value of students.

This was articulated by Chief Executive Officer, The Meritorious Education Network, Dr. Safiuddin Siddique while addressing big number of MEN students at the ‘Honor’s Day’ ceremony here on Sunday; held to acknowledge the students with awards who performed excellent in different level exams under his educational network, and those Meritorians getting admissions on merit in different professional institutions within and outside the country.

He identified major issues with the education system mainly relating to the matric and intermediate exams, and to the curriculum in the province.

He said that for proper management and pursuance of the entire academic cycle —- from admissions to examinations – the education calendar for the year be fixed and announced before the beginning of the academic year. Mostly, the dates or programmes were not final. Even the examinations schedule used to be announced one or two months before and sometimes suddenly changed few days before the exams.

The exams dates must be fixed in the education calendar and exact timetable be announced at least six months before. Instead, he regretted, the boards of examinations did announce timetables just fifteen days before the examination, he said.

“Students do not know about the exams schedule and timetable till last month. This creates embarrassment among them and is not a good sign to credibility of education system,” he mentioned.

He cited the examples of O and A level exams system, and of Aga Khan Board where the dates and timetables of exams were fixed and available at their websites well on time.

Second major issue, he pointed out, was non-availability of the revised/updated curriculum books in Sindh; even new academic year had began. This would put students in trouble as they would have to study old books for few months till availability of new books.

“For first year, new syllabus was finalized last year but book are not in the market till now,” he said.

Thirdly, the pattern of examinations needs to be changed to modern methodology. Table of specification was either missing or not followed which was needed to ensure equal representation of all the chapters of a subject in the question paper. And, mostly the questions were recall based (rataism) and they did not determine competence of students but encouraging them for “rataism.”