The 2025 HSC and equivalent exams will be held on the same short syllabus as in 2024 and 2023.
This information was given by the Ministry of Education in a notification on Monday. Earlier, the information was also provided by the education board.
The 2024 HSC and equivalent exams will be held in the 2nd week of June, around four months later. The exams in 2024 will be held on the revised syllabus formulated in 2023. Tests will be held on all subjects. Each examination will be three hours long and will carry full marks, it added.
In 2025, HSC and equivalent exams will be held in all subjects. Each subject will be held full-time and receive full marks.
According to the education boards, the 2025 HSC and equivalent exams will be held in light of the revised syllabus. Instructions have been given to organize the exam according to the syllabus in which the exam was held in 2023.
Earlier, President of the Inter-Education Board Coordination Committee and Chairman of the Dhaka Education Board, Professor Tapan Kumar Sarkar, told the media on Sunday that next year’s Higher Secondary Certificate, or HSC, examination will be in the rearranged (abbreviated) syllabus.
But the exam will have full marks.
He further stated that the education ministry made the decision because the 2025 batch began their academic year later than expected, and will not have enough time to finish the entire syllabus.
“The students started their classes in October. They will have three fewer months to complete the syllabus. Hence, the syllabus will be shortened.”
This year’s HSC and equivalent exams will be held according to the revised syllabus prepared in 2023. Due to Corona, since March 2020, all classes had been closed in educational institutions in the country for almost one and a half years. Because of that, a random situation was created in the curriculum, the remnants of which still remain.
The HSC examinees in 2025 had taken their SSC and equivalent exams in 2023 based on an abridged syllabi. The exams started on Apr 30 and ended on May 28. The results were out on Jul 28 and academic classes for the HSC started on Oct 8.
Meanwhile, the Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC) examination could not be held in 2020 due to the COVID outbreak, requiring the government to get three relevant laws amended to publish results without holding public exams during a pandemic or any such act of God.
That made the 2020 HSC batch the first to get results without taking the test and see a 100% pass rate in the country’s history of public exams. The results were calculated from the examinees’ scores in the previous two public exams, SSC and JSC.
All the examinees of the batch—roughly 13.66 lakh—passed the HSC and equivalent exams that year, with 1.62 lakh scoring the highest grade—a GPA of 5.
Then came 2021, also disrupted by waves of COVID outbreaks, and HSC examinees were allowed to sit for exams for three selected subjects on a short syllabus, only for one hour and 30 minutes per exam—half of the usual exam hour.
There was no test for compulsory subjects such as Bengali and English. Nearly 13.71 lakh students took the test that year. And over 95% of them passed, with 1.89 lakh GPA-5s.
A short syllabus is one of the reasons for the good results. This year we took 50-mark exams on a short syllabus and later converted it to 100 marks. We selected 50% of the segments of the books that were most important to prepare the syllabus.
Taking exams on a short syllabus is not a way of making a proper assessment. Through this, a brief syllabus is inculcated in our students, which is harmful for their future.
