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Medical admission test on February 9
Rtv news
24 Dec 2023, 16:32
The admission test for medical colleges under 2023-24 academic sessions will be held on February 9.
The one-hour-long admission test will begin at 10am on the day.
The decision was taken at a meeting on the MBBS and BDS admission tests for the academic year 2023-24 held at the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on Sunday (Dec 24).
All coaching centres will remain closed for a month.
Health and Family Welfare Minister Zahid Maleque presided over the meeting.
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Students Struggle to Read Long Books, Oxford Professor Claims
Sir Jonathan Bate, a professor of English literature at the University of Oxford, has said that many young people applying to higher education have not read extensively.
Bate, who is also a foundation professor of environmental humanities at Arizona State University, said that this drop in ability can be pinpointed down to one key factor - diversity drives at higher education establishments.
He conceded that shorter attention spans are also to blame, though the problem lies within recruitment drives.
Speaking to the BBC, he said: "The currently fashionable answer is that it’s to do with the attrition of attention span due to smartphones, six-minute YouTube videos, and instant TikTok dopamine hits."
"It all begins in schools. You only have to look at the thinning of the GCSE and A-level syllabuses and the tendency to prescribe works because they’re shorter. I think of it as the John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men effect — they would never prescribe the Grapes of Wrath anymore but Of Mice and Men is nice and short."
He said that a key difference between students in state schools and private schools is the length of literary material they are exposed to.
Bate added that it was "an unintended consequence of the push in both the elite British and American universities towards diversity and access … because of course, those students come from disadvantaged schools where the teachers’ main task is crowd control, and so the demands in terms of reading long books are just not there."
Elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge have been trying to recruit more state school students, with successful applicants more than doubling in the last six years.
Meanwhile, admissions from private schools have dropped.
Bate said that he had witnessed this attainment gap firsthand whilst teaching at Oxford.
"They were able students, but they simply hadn’t been exposed to large numbers of long books," he said. "They hadn’t developed that habit of concentrated, lengthy reading which private schools in both the UK and the US concentrate on."
He said that in previous years, students could get through three novels in a week, though now many will barely be able to read one every three weeks.
Bate said that this is worrying for the future if the reading levels continue to dip.
"If you haven’t got readers, what are writers going to do? The intensive, thoughtful, quiet reading of great books is good for mental health. It’s very, very good for developing skills of concentration and critical thinking, and if that falls away, that is problematic for businesses, for society, for individuals."
By Holly Bishop
Committee Formed to Assess Spending on New Curriculum Implementation
A committee has been formed by the Ministry of Education to determine how much money has been spent on the implementation of the widely discussed and criticized new curriculum.
Confirming the matter on Wednesday, October 9, Professor Dr. A K M Riazul Hasan, Chairman of the National Curriculum and Textbook Board (NCTB), stated that a five-member committee has been formed to ascertain the total expenditure on implementing the new curriculum thus far. The committee will be led by a member of the NCTB and supported by four other members. Their task is to investigate and report how much money has been spent on the new curriculum implementation up to this point.
Earlier, on September 1, the Ministry of Education issued a notification stating that the new curriculum is not feasible for implementation. A revised curriculum will be taught from 2026.
The notification also mentioned that with the collaboration of education experts, curriculum and assessment specialists, education administrators, and representatives from civil society and parents, the final version of the revised curriculum will be completed in 2025 and fully implemented in 2026. It also stated that teaching and assessment will follow the curriculum from 2012 until then.
DU Admission Tests Begin January 4
The admission tests for the new academic year at Dhaka University (DU) will commence on January 4.
The decision was announced on Monday (October 21) following a meeting of the university's general admissions committee. As per the schedule, the Fine Arts unit exam will take place on January 4, followed by the Arts, Law, and Social Sciences unit on January 25. The Science unit test is set for February 1, and the Business Studies unit exam will be held on February 8.
Additionally, the IBA unit's admission test is scheduled for January 3.
Applications for the admission tests will open on November 4 at 12 PM and close on November 25 at 11:59 PM. This year's application fee is set at 1,050 BDT.
