KARACHI. The matric and intermediate session for the academic year 2024/25 has been converted into a semester system due to the poor strategy and lack of planning exhibited by the Education Department in Sindh. This is the only session in which teaching will continue for barely six and a half months after which matriculation and inter-students will take their annual exams with a shortened syllabus because the current session has been officially reduced to just three and a half months.
The current session 2024/25 started on August 15 with a total delay of four months due to the unavailability of textbooks. Although the current session 2024/25 was initially expected to start from April 15, the caretaker government in power at that time realized that textbooks were not ready for the start of the session therefore while citing the election process and the construction of polling stations in schools, it shifted the start of the session from April 15 to August 1.
Initially, the session 2024 was delayed by three and a half months, but when August 1 approached, the current government once again realized that textbooks were still not ready in Sindh and the session would have to be postponed by another 15 days and a notification was announced in July to start the session from August 15 instead of August, which applied to government as well as private schools.
Private educational institutions rarely use the government curriculum except for classes 9 and 10. The current session in Sindh started from August 15 after a delay of three and a half months after this decision while the first year of the second-year classes in government colleges were further delayed due to a long admission phase and three consecutive separate merit lists being issued.
The first year of inter-classes in colleges could barely start in September. When the steering committee meeting was called on November 28 to decide the next academic calendar after this situation, it was decided to start the next academic session 2025/26 from April 15 and at the same time start the matriculation exams from March 15 and the inter exams from April 15.
When it was revealed in the meeting that if the next session 2025 starts from April 15, then the current session will be limited to six and a half to seven months in total, it was decided to conduct the matriculation and inter exams with the syllabus reduced by 25 percent. It was also stated that educational institutions should complete half the syllabus before the winter vacations while only 50 percent of the remaining half of the syllabus is to be taught.
According to the Directorate of Curriculum Assessment and Research, a subsidiary of the Sindh Education Department, the exams will be conducted from a reduced syllabus in all faculties of matriculation and intermediate.
It should be noted that millions of students of class 10 in Sindh will go to colleges without studying the important topics of their subjects while the students of the second year of intermediate will similarly study a short syllabus and participate in the aptitude tests of various universities including MBBS, where these tests will be conducted from the full syllabus.
Opinion published in the Express Tribune on 1st January 2025
