HSC exams, long delayed by pandemic, open to 1.4m students on Thursday

About 1.4 million students from 9,183 institutions are set to take HSC and equivalent exams starting on Thursday after a delay of nearly eight months due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Higher Secondary Certificate exams will open at 2,621 centres across Bangladesh at 10 am with Physics Paper 1 and end on Dec 30 with Social Science Paper 2 and Social Work Paper 2 in the morning and Sports Paper 2 in the afternoon.

The government is holding the HSC and Secondary School Certificate exams this year on three elective subjects only, scrapping the compulsory and a fourth elective subject, for which the students will be graded through subject mapping.

This year's HSC assessments consist of six papers from the shortened syllabuses of three elective subjects as the pandemic continues to claim lives even after ebbing.

Students will get one and a half hours to finish the exams instead of the usual three. The students from the science stream will need to answer 12 multiple choice questions or MCQs out of 25 in 15 minutes. They will have one hour and 15 minutes to write the answers to two out of eight questions.

Instead of tests, the results of the HSC last year were based on the students’ performances in Junior School Certificate and SSC exams. The SSC tests this year were held recently.

Among the students who have registered for the tests for HSC, nearly 730,000 are male and about 670,000 are female.

Keeping the pandemic in mind, the government has ordered the exam centres to take measures to ensure hand sanitisation of the students and temperature screening in line with the health protocols.

Steps have also been ordered to control the crowds of parents outside the centres.