The Chattogram education board recorded a pass rate of 52.07% this year, its lowest in 15 years. Last year the figure was 52.57%, so the fall is 0.50 points — but the number of GPA-5s dropped by 3,201, to 2,929.
Of 99,878 candidates, 50,166 passed. The result was announced at the board auditorium by examination controller Professor Parvez Sazzad Chowdhury.
The district figures
The board covers Chattogram, Cox’s Bazar, Rangamati, Bandarban and Khagrachhari, and the district breakdown is where the average stops being useful:
Chattogram city — 66.20%
Chattogram district including the city — 57.42%
Cox’s Bazar — 43.34%
Bandarban — 41.42%
Rangamati — 33.24%
Khagrachhari — 29.85%
That is a spread of 36.35 percentage points inside a single board sitting a single set of papers. A student in Khagrachhari was less than half as likely to pass as a student in Chattogram city.
What sits underneath the gap
The three hill districts — Rangamati, Bandarban and Khagrachhari — occupy the bottom three places, and they share a set of conditions that no examination accounts for.
Colleges are far apart and journeys are long and seasonal. Specialist teachers in English, ICT and the sciences are hardest to recruit and retain there. Mains electricity is intermittent in a way that makes a computer laboratory or an evening of study unreliable. Mobile data coverage, which is how a student without a library reaches anything, is thinnest in exactly these areas.
Each of those is a known, measured deficit, and each one lands on the same students. The examination then records the combined effect as an individual result.
The stream figures say the same thing twice
Within the board, science passed at 74.42%, business studies at 54.14% and humanities at 38.31% — across 283 colleges.
That ordering is not a statement about the difficulty of the subjects. Science streams exist where there are laboratories, equipment and specialist staff, which means they exist disproportionately in the better-resourced urban institutions. Humanities is what a college offers when it cannot offer science. So the stream gap and the district gap are substantially the same gap, measured twice.
Which is the argument for publishing results at district and institution level rather than only as board averages. A board average of 52.07% suggests a uniform problem. The real distribution shows where the deficit actually is, and it is the only version a policy response could act on.
Why this particular board is worth watching
Chattogram is the board where the national pattern is easiest to see, because it contains both ends of the country’s educational distribution inside one administration: a large commercial city with well-equipped colleges, and three hill districts with some of the thinnest infrastructure in Bangladesh.
Most boards are more uniform, which means their averages conceal less. Chattogram’s spread makes visible what the others are also doing — averaging across conditions so different that a single figure describes neither.
And the figure that should follow
The board publishes district rates on results day, which is more than most manage, and it is the reason this analysis is possible at all. What would complete it is the same breakdown for GPA-5 — currently reported only as a board total of 2,929 — because the top of the distribution is where geographic advantage compounds most sharply.
