GOVERNANCE: WHEN AN EXAM REFUSES TO LEARN

Illustration by Sarah Durrani In January 1997, I published an article, titled The CSS English Paper: A Scrutiny, in Dawn. The argument was simple: the English (Précis and Composition) paper of the Central Superior Services (CSS) examination tested neither authentic language proficiency nor the communicative skills required of a modern civil servant. Instead, it relied on archaic formats, ritualised exercises, and decontextualised language fragments, that distorted both teaching and learning. Nearly three decades later, the English paper of 2025 forces a sobering conclusion: nothing of substance has changed. This is no longer a matter of academic disagreement or pedagogical fashion. When a critique is placed in the public domain, grounded in language education and assessment principles, and then ignored for almost three decades, the question shifts. It is no longer “Is the criticism valid?”, but “What does such sustained inaction reveal about the institution itself?” ENGLISH AS SYMBOLIC CAPITAL The CSS English paper occupies a peculiar position. Unlike university examinations, it is not tied to a syllabus, a degree programme or a prescribed curriculum. It enjoys exceptional autonomy. That autonomy should have encouraged innovation. Instead, it has produced rigidity. Where there is no curriculum to constrain reform, repetition becomes a choice. The most striking contemporary feature is the prominence of synonym-antonym questions built around rare, arcane or low-utility vocabulary. These items do not test how candidates read, write, summarise, argue or communicate. They test whether candidates have memorised esoteric word lists — often through coaching centres that specialise in precisely this form of ritual preparation. A critique of the CSS English paper published in 1997 remains unanswered nearly three decades later. What does such institutional inaction reveal about how standards, merit and authority are understood in Pakistan’s most powerful examination? This is not English as a working language. It is English as symbolic capital. Language proficiency, in any meaningful sense, is contextual. Meaning emerges from use, register, audience and purpose. Yet, the CSS English paper persists in stripping language of context, presenting words and sentences as isolated tokens to be decoded. This produces an illusion of rigour — multiple-choice questions appear objective and easy to mark — but it sacrifices validity for convenience. Reliability is purchased at the cost of relevance. INSTITUTIONAL INERTIA The précis exercise, long treated as the paper’s intellectual centrepiece, illustrates this confusion. Compressing a few hundred words to a prescribed length may look demanding, but it bears little resemblance to the kinds of summarising tasks civil servants actually perform: extracting key points, identifying implications, organising information for decision-makers. Modern applied linguistics questioned the pedagogical value of such exercises decades ago. That the format persists unchanged speaks less to its merit than to institutional inertia. Equally troubling is the asymmetry of power embedded in the examination. Candidates are penalised relentlessly for minor linguistic lapses, while the examination paper itself has, over the years, displayed ambiguities, careless proofreading and conceptual confusion. When errors occur in a high-stakes paper and provoke no accountability or public explanation, the message is clear: the examination is beyond challenge. Power, once insulated from scrutiny, stops learning. In 1997, it was still charitable to attribute these problems to ignorance or habit. Today, that charity is harder to sustain. Over the last three decades, communicative approaches to language teaching have become mainstream. The needs of public administration have grown more complex, not less. And yet, the paper remains anchored to a conception of English proficiency that privileges lexical obscurity over functional competence. At this point, continuity itself becomes evidence. It is no longer unreasonable to describe the paper as a gatekeeping mechanism — one that filters candidates not by their ability to think and communicate in English, but by their familiarity with an inherited testing ritual. Gatekeeping does not require malice. It requires only that tradition be mistaken for standards and difficulty for merit. The real cost of this failure is not borne primarily by CSS candidates. It is borne by millions of students whose English education is shaped by the gravitational pull of this examination. When the highest-status assessment rewards ignoble skills, entire systems of teaching reorganise themselves accordingly. Rote learning flourishes; reading, writing and thinking wither. What, then, should be done? THE WAY FORWARD First, the Federal Public Service Commission (FPSC), which is responsible for recruiting government servants and bureaucrats, must publicly articulate a clear...

GOVERNANCE: WHEN AN EXAM REFUSES TO LEARN

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