Institution heads will face legal action if cheating found on their watch, says education minister

The government has revised the public exams law and will place it before parliament

School and college heads will be held legally responsible if cheating is found at their institutions, Education Minister ANM Ehsanul Hoque Milon has warned.

He clarified the government’s stance on Wednesday during an exchange of views with centre secretaries from the Dhaka, Mymensingh, Madrasa, and Technical Education Boards at Azimpur Girls’ School and College ahead of the scheduled Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC) and equivalent examinations.

Cheating has not vanished but shape-shifted into new forms, the minister said, likening it to a coronavirus variant and pointing to it as the driving force behind changes to The Public Examinations (Offences) Act, 1980.

“It has been passed in cabinet and will now go before parliament," he added.

He explained that Secondary School Certificate (SSC) candidates, typically around 16, cannot be directly penalised due to their age, but may be placed under probation, while institutional heads will be held legally responsible if cheating is found.

The minister also announced that the 2027 SSC examinations would be held in January, with the schedule fixed after consulting students, teachers and parents, who preferred the exams to wrap up before Ramadan and Eid-ul-Fitr rather than after.

He said the SSC syllabus would be completed by June and called on schools to arrange in-house coaching alongside pre-tests and tests, with teacher honoraria to be settled through discussions with local management committees.

Pointing to a sharp drop in the SSC pass rate to below 60 percent in 2025 after several years of stronger results, he said the trend needed to be steady and upward.

A sudden fall, he argued, pointed to weaknesses in either teaching or the examination system.

The minister also said teachers who had not received retirement benefits since 2022 would begin receiving them from mid-July.

Among those present were Dhaka-7 constituency MP Hamidur Rahman, Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education, Dhaka Chairman Prof Syed Aktaruzzaman and Secretary Prof SM Kamal Uddin Haider.