The overall performance in the 2026 Secondary School Certificate (SSC) and equivalent examinations was the worst in 19 years. The average pass rate dropped to 62.25 percent from 68.45 percent last year, and the number of GPA-5 learners fell by over 22,000. The overall pass rate is 80.64 percent for science (across the nine general education boards), 64.29 percent for business studies and 48.74 percent for humanities. The number of institutions recording a zero-pass rate rose sharply from 134 in 2025 to 312 in 2026. Other areas of concern have been raised, notably poor attainment in English and Mathematics.
High pass rates and rising numbers of GPA-5 achievers have been perceived as educational success for years now. This year’s result has put an end to that story. One explanation which was often repeated after the results were published is that answer scripts were marked more strictly, generous marking was lessened, the use of common papers increased, and monitoring was tightened. These factors may have played a significant role. However, explaining the entire decline through the examiner’s red pen would be too simplistic. An answer script is assessed at the end of an examination, but the performance reflected in it begins to take shape years earlier. It develops via learning styles, attention, family life, classroom routines, social life, and, more recently, the communication culture of a generation. To appreciate the 2026 results, therefore, we must consider the examination paper as well as the performance.
In communication studies, there is a concept that is relevant here: media ecology. Media are not merely tools people use. Different forms of media create an environment that shapes how people think, communicate, behave and pay attention. That space for today’s teens is far more than books, notebooks, blackboards and classrooms. It involves Facebook, YouTube, Reels, Shorts, messaging applications, games, notifications and the never-ending content that can be accessed via a smartphone device. The question, therefore, is how they studied – and within what kind of communication culture.
Many of the students in this year’s SSC exams were near completion of the primary school or in early secondary school when COVID-19 hit. Instead of being told to open their books, students were suddenly being told to ‘join the link’. The mobile phone became the classroom when phones were once banned in classrooms. On the same device, students encountered lessons and games, teachers and entertainment videos, homework and social-media notifications. Education and entertainment were beginning to merge for many members of one generation. Schools were eventually reopened, but the screen did not close. In fact, digital communication speeded up. Videos gave way to shorter clips, posts to stories, and stories increasingly to reels. The messages were cut short, the reactions were accelerated, and there was more competition for people’s attention.
This brings us to the attention economy. Attention is a precious thing on digital platforms. Algorithms get to know how long people watch, where they pause, what they skip and what captures their attention. They then provide further content that will be more interesting for a bit longer. These settings tend to favour novelty and quick changes of focus over focused attention. It is quite a contrast to formal examinations. While there is a lot of swiping away of content that does not appeal to people on the digital platform, there is a lot of grappling with content that is difficult on the examination platform. In digital life, information is instantly searchable; in the examination hall, students must retrieve it from memory. In online communication, there is a growing emphasis on being succinct; in written examinations there is a demand for explanation, argument, evidence and examples. This gap between the two ways of engaging could become a significant, though often unnoticed, learning obstacle.
If students are reading fewer long-form texts, practising analytical writing less often, and rarely developing arguments across several handwritten pages, it is reasonable to ask whether these changes are affecting performance. There also is working memory. It has long been known from psychological studies that there is limited capacity in human working memory. Frequent changes in video content, switching between apps, notifications, etc. can make it harder to sustain attention. But there is a caution to be taken. With the use of mobile phones, there is no simple formula where users automatically fail their exams. Such a conclusion would be simplistic. But it would not be surprising if problems arose in a three-hour written test when students spend substantial amounts of time engaging with rapidly changing digital stimuli.
Handwriting deserves attention as well. Today’s adolescents can type, tap and scroll quickly, but it is less clear whether the habit of writing extended answers by hand has remained equally strong. Handwriting requires the retrieval of words, formation of letters, hand-eye coordination and the maintenance of a continuous train of thought. Whether reduced practice in extended handwriting affects written examination performance deserves systematic research in Bangladesh. Yet technology alone cannot explain the result. This generation also passed through adolescence during an unusually turbulent social and political period. The end of the pandemic did not immediately restore prolonged educational stability. The student movement of 2024, violent confrontations, internet shutdowns, interruptions to academic activities and major political changes created a broader atmosphere of uncertainty. For adolescents, politics was no longer confined to television news. It appeared constantly on Facebook feeds, friends’ posts, neighbourhood marches, family discussions and viral videos. The textbook was therefore competing not only with entertainment but with an unsettled society.
Students prepared for examinations while online spaces were filled with tension, attended classes amid uncertainty and experienced disruptions in the academic calendar. It is therefore legitimate to ask whether they enjoyed the stable environment necessary for sustained concentration. Attention is not simply a matter of personal discipline; regular classes, a predictable academic calendar, a reasonably calm family environment and a basic sense of certainty about the future all contribute to it.
A poor pass rate does not imply a sudden decline in educational standards in any one year. It would therefore be equally risky to explain the decline simply by saying that scripts were marked more strictly. Concurrently, it would be perilous to believe that marking of scripts was more rigorous. If tighter assessment merely exposed weaknesses that had previously remained hidden, the warning may be more serious than the numbers themselves suggest.
The decline in results is not an isolated event, but a reflection of deeper disruptions in education, learning environments, and students’ changing habits. Today’s students live in a fast, digital world, yet they are assessed through a traditional, memory-based examination system. After years of interrupted schooling and uncertainty, the examination hall becomes the place where these hidden weaknesses finally become visible. An educational crisis, therefore, does not always begin in the exam hall; sometimes, the exam hall simply reveals it.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author
The writer is an Associate Professor, Department of Communication and Journalism, University of Chittagong; Doctoral Scholar, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Jadavpur University, India. Email: [email protected]
