What changes are coming to BCS exams?

The PSC plans to bring changes to the exam process and evaluation from the 46th BCS written examination

The Bangladesh Public Service Commission (PSC) is making changes in procedure and evaluation as part of its plan to complete the proceedings of Bangladesh Civil Service exams within a year.

One such change asks examinees to answer each question in the exam in order. The commission is also bringing changes in the way that written exam scripts are marked.

PSC Chairman Md Sohorab Hossain told bdnews24.com, “One aspect is improving the quality, another is to reduce the time. We have been working on these two targets for three and a half years. Now, slowly, we are starting to see results."

These changes include a change in the requirements for the exam scripts from the 46th BCS written exam. From now on, the answers to questions must be written down in order starting with question No. 1. If an examinee chooses to answer a later question first, they have to leave enough space to write down their answers to any previous question.

To make the matter clearer, the instruction will be included on the exam script from the 47th BCS exam.

The PSC chairman said that the exam scripts will be reviewed at the commission in order to speed up the process and release the results as soon as possible.

He said, "For a trial run, the mathematics section of the 45th BCS written examination was checked on site at the office of the Public Works Commission in the capital’s Agargaon. It took nine days to complete checking the math exam scripts. The initial plan aimed to finish it in four days, but it took a bit more time because we could not get all the teams of examiners together."

Each team of examiners will have 13 members to go through the written exam scripts. Each examiner will look at the answers to the same questions on all the papers. This means that each examiner will be assigned one question on each exam script. In this way, 10 examiners will be assigned to check the answers to 10 questions. Two other examiners will add up the marks and then the chief examiner will do a final review.

This method will ensure there is no discrimination in the process, Sohorab said.

Under the new system, answer sheets will also be provided to the examiners before they begin checking. As a result, specific answers will be set down for short questions and math questions. In the case of descriptive questions, possible answers will be provided.

“The answers will be set beforehand so that every candidate is marked fairly and every question is marked properly. We have seen that this is the best option. Exams are evaluated using the same standard. There is no possibility of someone getting more or less marks than they deserve, but the checking of exams is sped up. We will speed it up further in the future.”

The PSC also wants to change the conventional methods used for oral exams in order to better evaluate candidates’ merits, he said.

Currently, from the time a notification for a BCS exam is released, it takes more than two years to conduct the preliminary exam, the written exam, and the viva and release the results.

The final results of the 43rd BCS were declared on Dec 26 last year. The initial notification for the exam was published on Nov 30, 2020 and the preliminary examination was held on Oct 29, 2021. This means it took three years and one month for the results to be released and the 43rd BCS to be completed.

PSC Chairman Sohorab hopes that once the new system is implemented, it will be possible to complete each BCS in a year.

He hopes such a timeline will be possible from the 47th BCS.

The final results of the 44th and 45th BCS will be published this year, he said.