Job seekers staged a demonstration in Mirpur on Sunday, demanding cancellation of the recruitment exam for the post of primary assistant teacher, alleging question leaks and irregularities.
Protesters gathered outside the Directorate of Primary Education, chanting slogans and demanding that the exam be nullified and held again through a transparent process.
They placed a five‑point demand and declared that their movement would continue until those demands were met.
According to candidates, parts of the question paper that circulated on social media two days before the exam appeared exactly in the actual test. They also claimed that sending the question papers to district offices on 25 December and holding the exam almost two weeks later allowed leaking syndicates to gain access.
According to the Directorate of Primary Education, there were 14,385 vacant posts, against which 1,080,080 applications were submitted — meaning nearly 75 candidates competed for each position on average.
Of these, 745,929 applications were received from Rajshahi, Rangpur, Sylhet, Khulna, Barishal, and Mymensingh divisions in the first phase for 10,219 vacant posts.
In the second phase, 334,151 applications from Dhaka and Chattogram divisions were submitted for 4,166 posts.
However, the directorate has not yet disclosed how many candidates actually appeared in the exam or how many were absent.
The demands include cancellation of the recruitment exam; holding all recruitment exams in Dhaka, with device scanners and network jammers at every test centre; formation of an independent committee to supervise; banning multiple exams on the same day and time; and ensuring that institutions with previous records of question leaks are not assigned exam question preparation in any capacity.
If question leaks are confirmed, everyone involved must face maximum punishment, and the head of the question‑setting institution must resign within 24 hours.
The assistant teacher recruitment exam was held on 9 January in 61 districts, excluding three hill districts, with more than 1.08 million candidates sitting for the test. In the days leading up to the exam, speculation over leaked questions circulated widely on social media, with some users sharing screenshots of the purported questions.
