PEC students to be tested only with creative questions from this year

From now on, the Primary Education Completion or PEC examinations will be held with the set of creative questions only, the National Academy for Primary Education or NAPE has announced.

“The question patterns and marks have been reset for PEC 2018. Creative questions will cover 100 marks as per a decision of the ministry,” the NAPE said in an order issued on Sunday.

The decision came following reports that the government was contemplating discarding multiple-choice questions or MCQs from competitive school and college tests.

MCQs were mostly leaked during the public exams in past few years.

In the last few years, the government has increased the portion of creative questions in PEC examinations in phases. They comprised 80 percent of the board exam in 2017 and 65 percent the year before. The rest were MCQs and traditional questions from textbooks. 

Creative questions were introduced in 2009 with only 10 percent of the total questions students were to answer. The percentage rose to 25 in 2013, 35 in 2014 and 50 in 2015.

PEC marks completion of the primary level education by fifth graders in Bangladesh.

The authorities extended exam hours to two-and-a-half hours from two hours as creative questions require more time to answer.

The latest NAPE order, however, has not mentioned any change in the exam hours which indicates that the students will get the same amount of time to answer 100-mark creative questions.

Last year, students answered creative questions in 50 papers from 26 subjects in the Higher Secondary Certificate or HSC examinations.

The ongoing Secondary School Certificate or SSC tests have followed the same pattern. Creative questions appeared in all the tests except Bangla paper II and English paper II.

The Junior School Certificate or JSC examinations were held under the creative questions system last year. Bangla paper II and English paper I and II were the exceptions.

Education Minister Nurul Islam Nahid believes that creative questions system has curbed the tendency of cheating among students and improved their critical thinking ability.