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Overhaul of exam system for tackling cheating
Complete overhaul of exam system suggested
Nov 17: Karachi, Nov 17: Adviser to the Sindh governor Khan Yousuf Jamal has
underscored the need for a major overhaul of the examination system to improve
the fast deteriorating standard of education and to tackle the menace of
cheating in exams.
He was presiding over a brainstorming session and
workshop on 'Evaluation of examination system at secondary and intermediate
levels' held at the Board of Intermediate Education Karachi (BIEK) on
Saturday.
The idea of undertaking such an exercise was proposed by Sindh
Governor Dr Ishratul Ibad, who is also the controlling authority of all
educational boards of the province.
Chairmen and controllers of
examinations of educational boards of the province, senior officers of the
education department, office-bearers of the Sindh Professors and Lecturers
Association (SPLA), schoolteachers' bodies, retired professors and former
directors of schools and colleges attended the meeting.
Mr Jamal said that similar exercises would be held at Hyderabad and Sukkur within a month
and recommendations of all three workshops would be forwarded to the
governor.Stressing the need for a campaign against cheating in exams, Mr Jamal
said that apart from students, teachers and education officials, town nazims,
members of civil society and the media could play an important role to eradicate
the menace and could help promote a culture of acquiring knowledge.
He
admitted that there was a general perception among the public that the present
examination system was fast losing its credibility and hoped that the
participants of the workshop would recommend concrete measures aimed at removing
factors responsible for tarnishing the image of the examination
system.
In this regard, he suggested that motivated retired teachers and
professors could be assigned the task of monitoring the process of
examination.
He hoped that the recommendations of the workshop would be
result-oriented and would have an impact on the system of
education.
Coaching centres
About the mushrooming growth of
coaching and tuition centres, he said that it was beyond his comprehension why
no survey had been carried out to know their exact numbers and the methodology
of their teaching.
He said these centres were only preparing students for
examinations through so-called guides and notes.
Suspecting that vested
interests could be behind the flourishing business of coaching centres, he said
that the working of these centres should be monitored.
BIEK Chairman Prof
Anwar Ahmed Zai proposed that there should be a TV channel exclusively for the
promotion of education.
The adviser to the Sindh governor endorsed the
proposal and said that he would recommend the proposal to the
governor.
Earlier, participants of the workshop were divided into
different groups to formulate their recommendations on 'Prevalent examination
system and needs of its improvement', 'Areas of correction and role of
stakeholders', 'Policy issues', 'Legal instruments, if needed', and 'Awareness
campaign'.
Chairman Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education,
Sukkur, Prof (Dr) Mehboob Ali Shaikh, said that the present examination system
was not satisfactory and could be described as the collective failure of all
stakeholders which include teachers, the education department, district
education officers and parents.
He attributed the cause responsible for
the unsatisfactory examination system to lack of protection to invigilation
staff, interference of pressure groups and improper working of
boards.
The SPLA Karachi chapter's president, Prof Ather Hussain Mirza,
stressed the need for creating awareness among students that by resorting to
unfair means they might clear their exams but won't be able to acquire
'knowledge', which is an essential ingredient for leading a successful
life.
He underscored the need for making the vigilance system more
effective.
Former director of colleges Prof Haroon Rasheed said that it
was the responsibility of the government to provide proper security to vigilance
staff during an examination. He was, however, critical of the role of teachers'
organisations. He urged them to shun their practice of threatening boycott of
examinations on 'frivolous' grounds.
A former director of schools, Mrs
Mujibunnissa Essani, was of the view that the existing examination system was
promoting only 'rote learning', hence there was a need to change the system of
delivering lectures, covering the A to Z of a subject.
She suggested that
since a new pattern of examinations, having objective-type questions and short
answers, was being introduced for Class IX and XI annual examinations-2009,
teachers should adopt the methodology of having question-answer sessions with
students.
Prof Ahmed Zai said that the workshop, organised on the
instructions of the Sindh governor, was aimed at re-assessing the examination
system at the secondary, intermediate and equivalent levels in the province. Dawn
Your Comments
"please anyone tell me exact date of b.com examination."
Name: shireen
Email: juliet_hotline@live.com
City, Country: karachi
"Standard of education has deteriorated from bad to worse. No body wants knowledge everyone wants a cow ! "
Name: M. Shahjahan Bhatti
Email: shahjahan.bhatti@hotmail.com
City, Country: Dera Ismail Khan, Pakistan
Post your comments
Can science save the world?
The decisions that we will make both individually and collectively in the
foreseeable future will determine whether twenty-first century science yields
benign or devastating outcomes
For most people, there has never been
a better time to be alive than now. The innovations that drive economic advances
- information technology, biotech, and nanotech - can boost living standards in
both the developing and the developed world.
We are becoming embedded in a
cyberspace that can link anyone, anywhere, to all the world's information and
culture - and to every other person on the planet.
Twenty-first century
technologies will offer environmentally benign lifestyles and the resources to
ease the plight and enhance the life chances of the world's two billion poorest
people. Moreover, the greatest threat of the 1960s and 1970s - nuclear
annihilation - has diminished. This threat could recur, however, if there is a
renewed standoff between new superpowers. And there are other risks stemming
from humanity's greater collective impact on the planet, and from the growing
empowerment of individuals.
Soon after World War II, physicists at the
University of Chicago started a journal called the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
to promote arms control. The logo on the Bulletin's cover is a clock, the
proximity of whose hands to midnight indicates the editors' judgement of the
precariousness of the world situation. Every few years, the minute hand shifted,
either forwards or backwards. It came closest to midnight in 1962 during the
Cuban Missile Crisis.
When the Cold War ended, the Bulletin's clock was
put back to 17 minutes to midnight. But the clock has been creeping forward
again. We are confronted by proliferation of nuclear weapons (by, say, North
Korea and Iran). Al Qaeda-style terrorists might willingly detonate a nuclear
weapon in a city centre, killing tens of thousands.
Even if the nuclear
threat is contained, the twenty-first century could confront us with grave new
global perils. Climate change looms as this century's primary long-term
environmental challenge. Human actions - burning fossil fuels - have already
raised the carbon dioxide concentration higher than it has ever been in the last
500,000 years, and it is rising by about 0.5 percent a year.
More
disturbingly, coal, oil, and gas are projected to supply most of the world's
growing energy needs for decades to come. If that continues, the concentration
of CO2 will rise to twice the pre-industrial level by 2050, and three times that
level later in the century.
The world spends nearly $7 trillion a year on
energy and its infrastructure; yet our current research and development efforts
are not up to meeting the challenge of climate change. There is no single
solution, but some measures, like better insulation of buildings, would save
rather than cost money.
Efforts to economise on energy, storing it, and
generating it by "clean" or low-carbon methods deserve priority and the sort of
commitment from governments that were accorded to the Manhattan Project (which
created the atomic bomb) or the Apollo moon landing.
The top priority
should be a coordinated effort by Europe, the United States, and the other G-8+5
countries to build demonstration plants to develop carbon capture and storage
(CCS) technology. This is crucial, because whatever technical advances there may
be in solar and other renewable energy sources, we will depend on coal and oil
for the next 40 years. Yet unless the rising curve of annual emissions can be
reversed, the CO2 concentration will irrevocably reach a truly threatening
level.
Mankind must also confront other global "threats without enemies"
that are separate from (though linked with) climate change. Loss of biological
diversity is one of the most severe such threats. The extinction rate is 1,000
times higher than normal, and is increasing.
Biodiversity is a crucial
component of human well-being and economic growth. We are clearly harmed if fish
stocks dwindle to extinction. Less evidently, there are plants in the rain
forest whose gene pool might be useful to us.
The pressures on our planet
depend, of course, on our lifestyle. The world could not sustain its 6.5 billion
people if they all lived like present-day Americans. But it could if even
prosperous people adopted a vegetarian diet, travelled little, and interacted
virtually. New technology will determine our lifestyle, and the demands that we
make on energy and environmental resources.
Nevertheless, our problems
are aggravated by rapid growth in the human population, which is projected to
reach eight or even nine billion by 2050. If the increase continues beyond 2050,
one cannot help but be gloomy about most people's prospects.
There are
now, however, more than 60 countries where the fertility rate is below
replacement level. If this were true of all countries, the global population
would start to decline after 2050 - a development that would surely be
benign.
All of today's developments - cyber, bio, or nano - will create
new risks of abuse. The American National Academy of Sciences has warned that,
"Just a few individuals with specialised skills...could inexpensively and easily
produce a panoply of lethal biological weapons...The deciphering of the human
genome sequence and the complete elucidation of numerous pathogen
genomes...allow science to be misused to create new agents of mass
destruction."
Not even an organised network would be required; just a
fanatic with the mindset of those who now design computer viruses. The global
village will have its village idiots.
In our increasingly interconnected
world, there are new risks whose consequences could be widespread - and perhaps
global. Even a tiny probability of global catastrophe is unacceptable. If we
apply to catastrophic risks the same prudent analysis that leads us to buy
insurance - multiplying probability by consequences - we would surely prioritise
measures to reduce this kind of extreme risk. The decisions that we will make
both individually and collectively in the foreseeable future will determine
whether twenty-first century science yields benign or devastating outcomes.
-DTPS
Martin Rees
Lord Rees is Britain's Astronomer Royal, President of the Royal
Society, Master of the University of Cambridge's Trinity College, and Professor
of Cosmology and Astrophysics (Daily Times)
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| Education News | | Updated: 25 May, 2012 |
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