Admission into NU on SSC, HSC results from next year likely

Khairul Islam
The National University (NU) authorities are set to enroll students for honours course based on their academic results of secondary and higher secondary examinations from the next academic year, sources have said.
"It has become very hard for the university authorities to hold a nationwide admission test accommodating over 0.5 million students at a time," said NU Vice Chancellor Prof Harun-or-Rashid.
Besides, the existing traditional MCQ based admission system has already sparked question over effective evaluation of the university students across the country, he said.
Prof Rashid said: "Our special senate meeting scheduled to be held tomorrow (Saturday) will discuss the issue with due importance to introduce the new system of student enrolment".
The university authorities have taken the admission plan as part of its fresh action plan to ensure imparting quality education at the country's largest university.
"We are working sincerely to make the country's lone chain university the centre of academic excellence as the university represents the whole nation," he noted.
Presently, NU has some 2.1 million students of whom 1.29 million under the state-run colleges, while 0.81 million under its affiliated private colleges which cover nearly 70 per cent of the country's tertiary education.
Prof Rashid said this year nearly 0.52 million students appeared at the university's admission test held on December 19, 2014 against nearly 0.26 million seats across the country.
The university's vice chancellor stressed the need for upgrading the level of education quality making it as the national centre of academic excellence.      
However, former NU Vice Chancellor Prof Syed Rashidul Hasan partially disagreed with the university's decision of enrolling students based on their SSC and HSC results.
"Unfortunately, results of our public examinations completely failed to achieve credibility among the common people, therefore selecting students only based on the results would not be a good decision" Prof Hasan said.
He, however, suggested setting at least GPA 3.5 separately for SSC and HSC for one of the honours admission criteria. "It's not necessary that everyone has to be a graduate but it is mandatory that the authorities must ensure required quality of its schooling," he said.
The university also took a set of measures recently including decentralisation of its administrative function to put an end to its existing academic gridlock.
The measures also include developing special software for evaluating answer scripts, preparing results electronically, publishing the results within three months after exams and digital communication among the affiliated colleges.
khairulislamdu@gamil.com