Kathmandu, August 7
The National Examinations Board has decided to postpone the grade 12 final examinations scheduled to begin next week indefinitely.
The exams were scheduled to begin on August 15 and end on 25.
A meeting of the board held on Saturday made the decision. Earlier, State Minister for Health Umesh Shrestha had asked the Education Ministry to postpone the exams citing the number of active Covid-19 cases is going up in the country again.
Education Secretary Ram Prasad Thapaliya says the next dates have not been fixed, adding the board will publish the new schedule at least 15 days in advance before the exams.
Before this, stakeholders and guardians had demanded that the board make sure all the examinees get vaccines before the test. For the past few days, they had run the #CancelNEBExams on social media and it had received widespread support.
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This time, the students were about to take the tests at their own schools (home centres) so that they could travel less for the exams amid the Covid-19 pandemic not subsiding yet.
In total, around 386,000 students were taking the exams across the country.
The exams scheduled for June 9 to 18 were postponed in May owing to the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in Nepal.
However, as the pandemic effects were gradually subsiding, the board had sought approval from the government to hold the exams and the government had approved it.
Meanwhile, the board was preparing to conduct the exams for 100 marks for most of the subjects this year. Last year, in its bid to shorten the students’ exposure to the crowds, the board had let schools give 60 per cent of the scores based on the students’ two years of performance. However, as the results came out, the schools’ evaluations were found to be apparently inflated and hence not fair.
Therefore, the board was discontinuing that model this year.
