LAHORE, May 9: The federal education ministry is set to review the part system examination at secondary school level and decide whether it should be continued, amended or scrapped.

A conference regarding this will be held at the FG Model College, Islamabad, to be presided over by Federal Education Minister Zubaida Jalal on Saturday (today). Chairmen of all education boards, textbook boards and curriculum research and development centres, federal government colleges’ principals, professors and students will attend the conference.

The first annual examination for class-IX have been concluded recently.

The education department officials claim that the government has been receiving a lot of complaints against the new system and division of syllabi in classes IX and X.

They said the division of syllabi did not ensure continuity in education. Citing an example, they said, the science group students were required to study chemistry and biology/computer science/a technical subject in part-I and mathematics and physics in part-II. In the humanities group, the students were required to take up general science and an elective arts subject or a technical subject in class-IX and mathematics and an elective arts subject in class-X.

The subjects studied by students in class-IX were not in class-X syllabus while the same subjects were again required to be studied in class-XI. Similar was the case with the subjects to be studied in class-X, they added.

The education department had notified last year that the secondary school examination from the 2002-03 academic session would be held in parts. The teachers and students of all the government and private schools insisted that the decision had been taken in haste.

The education department also failed to ‘properly publicize’ the newly introduced courses of study and the concept of the part system matriculation examination for class-IX students in all the government or affiliated private schools in the province. “Even teachers could not understand the new courses and impart instructions according to the requirements,” the officials said.

The department had trained thousands of schoolteachers under a ‘crash training programme’ during the previous summer vacation. “The department’s senior officials now admit that the programme had failed to train and motivate teachers to accept the new examination system,” they said.

When contacted, a former education board chairman said the department had made the class-IX students scapegoats for a ‘premature’ experiment on reforms. He said former education minister Akhtar Saeed was requested to start implementing the reforms from class-VI and gradually expanding the project to classes IX and X. However, he said, the education minister and his associates were bent on going ahead with the reforms without envisaging the careers of hundreds of thousands of students.