Chemistry, class 10

Five boards, one syllabus, and the clearest case in the study of a subject where the curriculum wins outright. Sindh numbers its eight units 1–8 — chemical equilibrium, acids and salts, organic chemistry, biochemistry, environmental chemistry in two parts, analytical chemistry, industrial chemistry — while KP and Balochistan run what is recognisably the same sequence numbered 9–16, continuing from class 9 rather than restarting. The content matches unit for unit; only the numbering betrays which board printed it. On religion the agreement is total: every board scores 1, and Balochistan's volume returns zero religious tokens across 42,030 words. Whatever these curricula do to history, they leave chemistry alone. Gender is where they agree in the opposite direction. Four of the five score 5, the floor of the scale: KP runs 0.1 feminine tokens per thousand words across 55,101 and names no woman scientist at all; Punjab is effectively absent across 44,979 words; Balochistan manages three feminine tokens in the whole book. The Federal Board is the single exception at 3, and it is worth noticing why — its title page credits two named women among its authors, including a serving college teacher in Islamabad. A book written by women is not automatically a book with women in it, but it is the only chemistry volume in the corpus that scores better than the floor. Assessment separates them least: Punjab's 2026 edition sets one evaluation prompt and no open prompt across the entire book, which is the most closed reading in the cell, while the other four sit at 3. This is a cell to read against the history cells. The same five boards that diverge sharply on 1971 are, in chemistry, printing one book.