The government has rescheduled the primary scholarship exam to Dec 30 from Dec 29 due to local elections in some districts.
“The scholarship exam will be held from 10 am to 12 pm on Dec 30. We have informed the field-level authorities. A formal notice will be sent out later,” said Mohammad Nazrul Islam, assistant director of the Directorate of Primary Education, reports bdnews24.com.
Previously, only 10 percent of fifth graders in each school across the country were able to take the test, but now the government has increased the figure to 20 percent, said Nazrul Islam.
Students will be tested on Bengali, English, Mathematics and Science on a scale of 100 marks with 25 marks for each subject. The exam will be two hours long.
Previously, fifth-graders were able to undertake the exams at the end of grade 5 in a bid to secure a scholarship for their secondary education.
But the introduction of the Primary Education Certificate exams in 2009 spelt the end of the separate scholarship exam. Students subsequently received a government stipend on the basis of their performance in the PEC exams.
However, the PEC exam has not been held for the last two years due to the coronavirus pandemic. Later, the government announced that the test would be scrapped as a new curriculum was on the way.
Under these circumstances, the government decided to resume the scholarship exams in a bid to identify meritorious students.
An inter-ministerial meeting was held on Nov 28 to come up with an alternative process to evaluate the talents of primary students instead of providing them with a stipend based on their PEC results. The authorities then decided to revive the traditional primary scholarship exam.
On Dec 1, the Department of Primary Education ordered district education officials to report back on the number of grade five students and exam centres available across the country.
The new education curriculum will be implemented in phases from next year. First and second grades in primary school and sixth and seventh grades in secondary school will follow the new curriculum, which does away with the PEC and Junior School Certificate exams.
The last PEC exam was held in 2019. Based on the results of the exam, more than 80,000 students were awarded a stipend in February 2020.
