HSC results: Pass percentage versus quality education

Hundreds of thousands of young students have come out with flying colours in this year's HSC examinations. They do rightly deserve congratulations for this, more so because their preparations for exams were under severe psychological pressure due to political programmes late last year. The pass percentage this year is higher than that of the previous year. Students fared well this year in both pass rates and achieving GPA-5. The pass percentage rose to 75.74, increasing by 4.61 percentage points from that of last year. The number of GPA (Grade Point Average)-5 achievers stood at 57,789, compared to last year's 46,736.   
The better results this year have been attributed to better trained teachers, use of multimedia in classrooms and students' better knowledge of information technology. At least one million teachers, as the minister for education commented on the outcome of this year's HSC examinations, have been trained after the introduction of the creative method of questions. This year questions of all the subjects were prepared following this method. Earlier, students failed mostly in Mathematics and English, but the government, as the minister noted, has been providing students with special classes for several years on these subjects in 85,000 schools. The minister, however, said the improvement should not be confined to higher pass rates only. The main challenge ahead now, as he admitted, is to ensure quality.
As the minister himself has taken up the issue of quality education as a challenge, there are seemingly some quarters which find, rightly or wrongly, the assessment of quality as a bashing of the government's education policy itself. Top academicians are quite justifiably and seriously concerned over the falling quality in higher secondary education. The dismissal of such concerns will tantamount to justification of low quality. In this context, criticisms are largely based on facts. Discarding such criticisms will not only lead to further erosion of quality but also encourage those who resort to cheating in passing the exams.
On its part, the government has been spending a large amount of money for promoting the cause of education. This is a welcome sign that the education sector has been receiving the highest budgetary fund allocation. None would like to see any wastage of public money for reasons of ineffective governance in the sector. Guardians send their sons and daughters to receive quality education but they will also be the first ones to taste the bitter pill if their wards do not qualify for the next higher echelons of education, not to speak of higher studies abroad.
It is the primary responsibility of the government to devise ways and means to ensure quality education. Higher pass percentage may make a government popular in terms of votes but at the end of the day, the nation would be a greater loser. Today, many top officials, as reports said, cannot communicate with the global community convincingly because of their poor educational quality. Such a grim situation will have a serious bearing on the country and the nation in the days ahead. Without making a dig at critics, it will be prudent and patriotic for the authorities concerned to plug all the holes through which quality is missed.