The transition of education level, from high school to university, is always a challenging matter for the students. Some of them can handle the challenge properly and can show expected performance. Meanwhile, some students face immense struggle and difficulty to show such performance in higher studies.
Does this struggle reflect the incompetence of a freshman? Is there no other reason than this?
Students’ performance in higher-level studies mostly depends on how well their high schools have prepared them for universities, aside from the regularity of studies.
In terms of preparing for university, Bangladesh’s school-level curriculum affects students severely. It mostly affects those who pursue their higher education abroad.
The national curriculum of Bangladesh is binding and rigid which doesn’t allow students to take courses beyond a set of courses determined by their group of studies. So, a student who is studying in the science group but might eventually decide to at least do a minor in economics doesn’t have the chance to study economics in their high school as economics is only offered to the students of the commerce group.
Similarly, it is not unnatural to expect a student from the science group to do a major in accounting or finance. Even when a student does not have a major in these areas, it is a trend to take many of these said courses as electives.
And unlike our curriculum, most schools throughout the world allow students to take these introductory courses in their secondary years. Thus, studying introductory microeconomics in the first year of university is just a mere revision for most while our people struggle to learn everything from the beginning. The competition they face is unfair and they are filled with the anguish of not being able to compete with their peers.
As technology continues to revolutionise our world, learning a bit of programming language has become almost a necessity. Most of the schools in other countries put an effort to teach their students a bit of programming. A student studying computer science can tell that the ICT course of NCTB is nothing but a subpar effort to teach students about technology. And when they see their peers with prior coding experience, they wish they learnt something in their high school as well.
Being an international student means living with uncountable challenges. Adjustment to a different country means facing social and cultural shocks. Financial struggles are a given and some even face a language barrier. On top of that, the academic struggles make it all worse. Failure to maintain steady grades affects a student’s mental health in the worst possible way.
Instead of wasting time writing infinite pages of so-called ‘creative’ questions, there are a lot of ways for preparing a child for post-secondary studies. But does this inability of our education system only affect those who pursue higher education abroad? Not really. It affects everybody but only the international students can assess their education standard by comparing with their peers. Our education system is in shambles and must be reformed. Can cramping seven creative questions in two hours and 20 minutes really develop our cognitive and analytical abilities? We must investigate it.
