Edu steering committee discusses means to curb cheating

Karachi  

Sindh Education Minister Nisar Ahmed Khuhro, while chairing a meeting of the provincial steering committee on education this past week, urged all members to suggest ways for preventing cheating in board exams and also discussed a few ideas in detail.

One of the ideas floated was the establishment of dedicated exam centres in Karachi, but the proposal was shot down as concerns arose over transportation, traffic management and other problems.

Picking up on this idea, the minister suggested holding exams in open spaces or grounds. Another idea was to install closed-circuit cameras for monitoring of students at examination centres to prevent them from using unfair means to pass the exam.

Interestingly, same time last year, the education minister in a similar meeting had declared his commitment to curb copy culture and had informed the Steering Committee that he was considering installation of closed-circuit cameras. But the follow-up meeting to finalise the decision with the attendance of relevant officials never took place.

The chairman of Private Schools Management Association, Sharf-uz-Zaman, called for providing four-feet-long desks which had been in use before to examination centres.

He believed that with the current seating arrangement with barely a foot between every candidate, they could easily peek in each other’s answer booklet.

“The examination boards should make arrangements in a way that a student of part-I sits on one corner of the bench and a candidate of part-II sits at the other end. In the next row, student of part-I sits behind candidate of part-II and vice versa,” he said.

According to Zaman, this will minimise the use of unfair means and the cheating culture, while also reducing expenditure on exams. “This would shrink the month-long schedule of annual board exams as students of class-IX and X can appear in the same time,” he said.

Meanwhile, the meeting also discussed the schedule of the next academic session, while also mulling over cancellation of a few holidays.

The Steering Committee also decided that the next academic session will begin from April 1, while classes of O and A level at Cambridge schools will begin from August 1. Though the Steering Committee directs colleges to start their academic sessions from August 2, but usually admissions are closed late in September or early October and the deadline given is ignored every time.

The committee also directed that examinations up to class VIII should be completed by March 15 and result be announced till March 31.

The theory exams of Secondary School Certificate-I and II will commence from April 7. The result of SSC-II (Class X) will be announced by July 15 by all examination boards of Sindh, while Board of Secondary Education Karachi will announce the results by July 31. The result of Class IX will be announced within 60 days after announcement of matriculation result.