Sindh’s matric, intermediate exams to be held in July, announces minister

The matric and intermediate examinations in Sindh will be held in July, wherein the final dates for the exams will be announced within the next two days, Sindh Education Minister Saeed Ghani said on Wednesday. Addressing a press conference at the Bilawal House Media Cell in Karachi, Ghani said that he had already decided to conduct annual exams for matriculation and intermediate classes in Sindh while other provinces were yet to take the decision. All decisions were taken after consultation with the Sindh Education and Literacy Department’s steering committee, experts, and all stakeholders of the education sector, he informed. The minister further said that thousands of candidates had applied for the recruitment of 37,000 vacant positions of teachers. Given the present coronavirus situation, the Institute of Business Administration Sukkur was unable to conduct the test through which aspirants would have been appointed. A day earlier, the Sukkur bench of Sindh High Court had ordered the Shah Abdul Latif University to take the law college tests in a phased manner. “The university should arrange exams twice or three times in a year to complete the degree programme within five years,” the bench ruled. Earlier this week, parents demanded the concerned authorities to conduct pre-board examinations to prepare the students for the final board assessments. The parents, worried about the future of their children whose admissions in medical and engineering institutes depend on their marks in intermediate and A-levels, called on the authorities to hold pre-board tests which serve chiefly as practice for the final assessments conducted by the Federal Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education. The parents are concerned about how their college-going children will perform in the intended board exams while they have not gone through proper testing and assessment as such in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. “Who will help them understand the nature of questions and the way to respond to those questions,” the parents asked, while terming it important that the students should go through at least one week of practice exams in their colleges. All the stakeholders, especially parents, are wonderstruck over the question of examinations without any prior preparation. The students have suffered an unprecedented academic loss due to the uncertain situation amid the pandemic.