A failure beyond the students

The question is not simply why this year’s students performed badly. The more important question is why the sytstem failed to identify and address their weaknesses.

This year’s SSC results should worry us far more than a sharp fall in the pass rate or the number of GPA-5 achievers. The results are a disturbing reflection of what has gone wrong in our education system.

The pass rate under the nine general education boards stood at 64.05 percent, the lowest in 19 years and around four percentage points lower than last year. The number of GPA-5 achievers also fell to 1,06,009 from 1,25,018. More worryingly, around 5.04 lakh of the over 14 lakh examinees failed. Behind that number are hundreds of thousands of students, their parents’ hopes, years of schooling, and, in many cases, considerable financial investment.

The immediate reasons for the poor results are not difficult to identify. Students performed particularly poorly in two fundamental subjects -- English and Mathematics. The average pass rate was around 74 percent in English and 76 percent in Mathematics. This is hardly a new phenomenon. Weak performance in these two subjects has repeatedly been associated with declines in overall pass rates.

This year, however, the problem was particularly severe among students in the humanities stream. Only 48.74 percent of them passed, compared with 80.64 percent among science students. That huge disparity deserves closer scrutiny, particularly because weaknesses in English and Mathematics appear to have played a significant role.

Authorities have also attributed the fall in the pass rate partly to stricter evaluation. If that is indeed the case, it raises an uncomfortable question: were students previously receiving marks that did not accurately reflect what they had actually learned?

The steady rise in SSC and HSC pass rates after 2008, when results remained above or around 80 percent for years and at times crossed 90 percent, had created an impression of considerable improvement in the education system. The sharp fall after this year’s “stricter evaluation” also suggests that the earlier high pass rates may not have fully reflected what students had actually learned, and may have been partly the result of more generous marking.

And that brings us to the real issue.

Why are so many students still failing English and Mathematics after spending 10 years in school?

It is easy to put the blame on the students. They did not study enough or they were inattentive. These may all be factors. But can we really hold hundreds of thousands of students solely responsible when the same weakness appears quietly often?

What about the teachers? What about the schools? What about the curriculum and teaching methods? What about the education boards and the ministry that are supposed to monitor learning outcomes? Most importantly, where is the system’s mechanism for identifying students who are falling behind and helping them catch up before they reach the SSC examination?

The problem does not begin in Class IX or X. It begins much earlier.

The Education Sector Analysis 2026, prepared by the government with UNICEF and development partners, points to a persistent learning crisis in Bangladesh. The assessment says half of children do not have foundational literacy skills and one in every three lacks foundational numeracy skills.

These are not merely statistics from a report. They provide an important explanation for what we are seeing at the SSC level. A student who fails to develop basic reading, writing and mathematical skills in primary school will inevitably struggle when those skills become the foundation for increasingly difficult lessons in secondary school.

Yet our system largely allows such learning gaps to accumulate. A child moves from one class to the next, often without mastering the competencies expected at the previous level. By the time the child reaches secondary school, the gap has become much harder to bridge.

The quality and availability of teachers make the problem worse. There are shortages of teachers at the secondary level, while questions remain about subject-specific training and teaching quality. In some schools, teachers have to take classes in subjects outside their own areas because there is simply no one else to teach them.

The inequality in learning opportunities is another part of the problem. Students from relatively well-off families can often compensate for weaknesses at school through private tutoring, coaching and other support. A student from poor family in a rural school may have none of these options. The result is that the quality of a child’s education can depend too heavily on where they live and what their parents can afford.

So the question is not simply why this year’s students performed badly. The more important question is why the system failed to identify and address their weaknesses long before they reached the SSC examination.

The government should therefore resist the temptation to treat this year’s results as an examination-year problem. A comprehensive diagnostic exercise is needed to determine where students are falling behind, particularly in English and Mathematics, and at which stage those gaps begin. The findings should then inform targeted remedial programmes, teacher training, recruitment and changes in classroom practices.

There is also a lesson here about how we measure success in education. A high pass rate is not necessarily evidence of a good education system, just as a low pass rate does not automatically mean that students have suddenly become weaker. What matters is whether children are actually learning.

If stricter evaluation has exposed weaknesses that were previously masked by generous marking, that should not be viewed simply as a crisis of examination results. It should be treated as an opportunity to confront a much deeper crisis of learning.

An overwhelming number of students have failed this year. Beyond the individual tragedies lies an even bigger concern: these are the young people who will enter higher education, vocational training and eventually the workforce. If they leave school without strong foundations in basic subjects, the consequences will extend far beyond one examination result.

The new government has repeatedly spoken of equipping young people with the knowledge and skills needed to face the challenges of the 21st century. That ambition cannot be achieved simply by changing curricula, examination systems or grading standards.

It must begin with something much more basic: ensuring that a child actually learns.

The SSC results have given us a warning. We should not waste it by merely debating why so many students failed this year. We should ask why we allowed them to reach the examination hall without the skills they needed to pass in the first place.