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The writer is a freelancer and a mentor hailing from Kandhkot, Sindh. He can be reached at alihassanb.34@gmail.com
“Hi, I hope you are well. I just encountered your column (CSS Mishap), and I can feel the pain of the deceased student because my (CSS) result came out yesterday. I didn’t qualify the written part. Could you please write another article? As a female, a day before my exams, my PMS (pre-menstrual syndrome) started. This 9-day exam became extremely tough for me. I dragged myself every single day, sitting on those strange, uncomfortable chairs where, by the time you return home, your back is so stiff that I don’t even know how to describe it. An exam you study so hard for, and in the end, biological changes push you to such a point. How many females like me are labeled as failures? Will anyone ever understand this agony? How did I survive those 9 days when a person’s attention span already shrinks and years-long efforts are decided in just 3 hours (paper)? Please write something about it.”
The email I received, carrying the story of a female aspirant, in the aftermath of CSS-2026’s written results this past week, carries untold tragedies for most aspirants and an overlooked blemish on the educational and coaching system, societal psyche and CSS exam. This column, however, examines the latter two.
CSS grips most of the youth in Pakistan and eclipses many silent tragedies that aspirants suffer as the cost of a tortuous and often betrayed hope. Save for the successful, whose costs are ultimately borne by the people, the rest of the aspirants face toxic social stigma for a fault largely lying in CSS and FPSC. The parents, friends and relatives solely blame aspirants for their failures and altogether overlook their efforts, the sleepless nights, the stressful life, the skipped meals, the predation by the coaching systems, and all flaws of FPSC. In fact, the exam is so vague that those who succeed and those who fail won’t objectively figure out the reasons. Neither does the FPSC.
What’s the qualification of examiners? What do they predictably and consistently reward in answer copies? How does marking escape their personal bias and external dictations? Why and what are the scoring trends in papers, how are they set, and who dictates them? Isn’t there any scissor phase after the result compilation aimed at minimising success rate in a bid to retain the “institution’s efficiency”? No one knows. All operate in ambiguity.
Notwithstanding the syllabus and instructions, what most results and marks show confirms neither of the two. For instance, an aspirant scoring 80 on the first attempt gets 18 in second and 8 in third. Under this (reverse) logic of FPSC’s, the more an aspirant reads, writes and practises a subject, the more he loses it. This isn’t a surprise. The real surprise is the implied suggestion in this context: Read not. Write not. Question not. And think not. And you succeed. This makes CSS more a compliance exam than a competitive one that sifts “cream” of the system rather than that of the people.
Meanwhile, the periodic examiners’ reports read like jokes, simplistic generalisations of the causes of failures of thousands of aspirants, written more as a formality than as an objective diagnosis. For the way the system rewards defies an upright intellect, integrity and honesty. Those who make it fail in succeeding the society and succeed in failing it. Had it been otherwise, the society wouldn’t have failed.
Today, as a tool of the system, CSS increasingly breeds desperation among youth – delivering pyrrhic societal success alongside real individual and collective failure.
Any way out? Undoing colonial CSS altogether is the lasting way out of both the social issues and the students’ desperation, however, an improbability today. Therefore, clarity and objectivity are needed. First, addressing the ambiguities and questions. Second, each aspirant’s DMC should carry personalised remarks and reasons from the examiner on every passing and failing paper, open to public and intellectual scrutiny – the same holding for the qualified. Last, an online feedback loop with aspirants should be formed wherein grievances are addressed.
