From 2 to 17:Daily Star

Poor performance of applicants aspiring to enrol in Dhaka University's English department has compelled the authorities to relax the eligibility criteria to fill the 150 seats of the department. At a meeting yesterday, the DU General Admission Committee lowered the pass mark to 8 from 15 in elective English section and 18 from 20 in general English section to allow applicants from kha unit to get
admitted. But despite that, the authorities found only 15 candidates qualified to enrol in the department from kha unit, apart from the two students who already got through the admission test. Making an exception to the usual practice of enrolling 25 candidates from gha unit, the committee then decided to get more students from the unit to fill the vacant seats for this academic session. With all these efforts, the authorities could find 134 candidates -- 17 from kha and 117 from gha unit -- who are eligible to get admitted to the department. However, it's not certain that all 134 applicants will enrol in the department, as the admission process is still on, said DU sources. In the admission test under kha unit last month, only two of 1,364 applicants qualified for enrolling in English department by obtaining at least 15 marks out of 30 in elective English and 20 out of 30 in general English. Advertisement "The meeting discussed the reasons behind the applicants' poor performance in English. Students don't achieve the desired competence in English due to shortage of qualified teachers at schools and colleges," said Prof Imdadul Haque, member of the admission committee. At the meeting at the DU senate building, the committee also decided to discontinue the opportunity for students to sit twice for admission tests. The decision was made to eliminate unequal competition between regular and irregular students, and discourage tutoring at coaching centres, said DU Vice Chancellor Prof AASM Arefin Siddique, who chaired the meeting. The university this year, for the first time, made elective English mandatory for students wishing to study English. They must obtain 15 marks in elective English section and 20 in general English section to be eligible. It was done with an aim to enrol students with better aptitude required to pursue higher education in English. A total of 1,364 students took the test and only Jannatul Ferdous Dola and Shahbaz Amin Bhuiyan got through. The abysmal performance of applicants triggered criticism from educationists. They attributed the disastrous results to poor quality of teaching at secondary and higher secondary levels. Most students lack aptitude for learning English and all they care is about getting good marks, they said. However, Education Minister Nurul Islam Nahid blamed the test method for poor results, and termed it faulty and unacceptable. He said the university authorities had intentionally set tougher questions so that only a few students could get through. This year, around 58 percent of 175,824 applicants in three units -- kha, ga and gha -- failed to secure pass mark in English. However, the results of previous admission tests were not satisfactory either, as more than half of the admission seekers failed to get pass mark in English in different units. Prof Arefin told The Daily Star that the applicants, who will fail to enrol in the DU in one academic session, will not get the chance to sit again for test the next year. Data show that almost half of those who enrol in the DU in an academic year are students of the previous academic session. This year, a total of 45,053 applicants passed the admission test in four units. Of them, 21,493 passed the HSC exams last year. Moreover, around 400 seats fall vacant every year in different departments, as many students switch to other departments by taking admission test for a second time. These seats remain vacant for the remaining three years of the graduation course. Discontinuation of the opportunity for taking the test twice will stop this bad practice, said Arefin. "Some applicants resort to cheating with the help of coaching centres when they take test for the second time," he said. This year, 30 applicants were caught with answers in inboxes of their cell phones during DU admission test at different exam centres outside the university. Most of them sat for test for the second time.