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About 1.4 million students are expected to sit for the Higher Secondary Certificate and equivalent examinations starting on Dec 2 after a nine-month delay due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Instead of tests, the results of the HSC last year were based on the students’ performances in Junior School Certificate and Secondary School Certificate exams.
This year's HSC assessments will consist of six papers from the shortened syllabuses of three elective subjects, reports bdnews24.com.
Students will only get one and a half hours to finish the exams instead of the usual three as the pandemic continues to claim lives even after ebbing.
Physics Paper 1 test will be held on the first day. The exams will end on Dec 30 with Social Science Paper 2 and Social Work Paper 2 in the morning and Sports Paper 2 in the afternoon.
For the SSC and HSC this year, the government has scrapped exams on the compulsory and fourth subjects, including Bangla and English, for which the students will be graded through subject mapping.
Among the students who have registered for the tests for Higher Secondary Certificate or HSC, nearly 730,000 are male and about 670,000 are female, Education Minister Dipu Moni said at a press conference on Thursday.
The candidates from 9,183 institutions will sit for the exams at 2,621 centres.
The students from science stream will need to answer 12 multiple choice questions or MCQs out of 25 in 15 minutes. They will have one hour and 15 minutes to write the answers to two out of eight questions.
For the students from humanities and business studies streams, there will be 15 MCQs out of 30 and three out of 11 questions in the written tests. The time limits will be the same as those of science stream.
Dipu Moni said the question papers were made in line with the previous rules where the students had to answer all MCQs and write the answers to at least five questions. So, the teachers must alert the students about the changed systems.
The government announced the schedules for the SSC and HSC tests in late September after reopening the educational institutions earlier that month following a closure for over a year and a half.
SSC examinations -- the first public tests held in schools amid the coronavirus pandemic -- began on Nov 14 with measures to protect the students from infection. Students need to wear masks and use hand sanitiser in compliance with health directives.