Patna: Hundreds of thousands of students in Bihar were left in a state of shock and despair with 70 per cent of them failing the class 12 examination, the results of which were declared today.
Authorities said over 1.2 million students had appeared in the class 12 examination conducted by the Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) this year of which 794,622 failed to clear the test.
The students from the science stream received the worst-ever setback with only 30.11 per cent clearing the test. As per an official report, a total of 646,231 students had appeared in the science examination of which 449,280 failed.
Likewise, only 37 per cent students passed the arts stream this time. Of the total 533,915 students sitting in the arts exam, 330,338 failed. The only silver lining was the result of commerce stream where around 74 per cent students passed but the number of students appearing in the exam was very few — a little over 60,000.
Last year, 67 per cent students had passed the science stream, 81 per cent passed the commerce stream and 57 per cent had passed the arts stream.
Authorities say the strict measures adopted by the state administration to stop cheating in the examination led to the drop in pass percentage. “The pass percentage has drastically dropped this year as we put in place a number of measures to stop cheating in the examination hall and ensure free and fair examination,” BSEB chairman Anand Kishore told the local media on Tuesday.
However, many students don’t agree with the views of the education department authorities and have blamed poor evaluation system and faults on the part of the system behind the poor results. “I had worked really hard and was expecting at least 95 per cent but got only 86 per cent. I don’t know how this happened,” rued Khusboo Kumari who has topped the science stream this year.
Education department authorities took the real hard measures this time after taking a lesson from the last time when many undeserving students had topped the merit list last year in alleged connivance with the jailed BSEB chairman Lalkeshwar Prasad and school principal, earning a major embarrassment to the state government.
The entire story which was later known as “Merit Scandal” came to fore when a local news channel interviewed class 12 arts topper Ruby Rai. During the interview, she failed to properly spell out the subjects she had studied and pronounced the Political Science as “Prodikal Science”.
Subsequently, the government called all the toppers for written interviews to test their knowledge but Ruby Rai skipped. Quite many toppers were later arrested, including Rai, even as the government cancelled their result and ordered an investigation into the merit scandal by a Special Investigation Team (SIT) which arrested around 40 persons in the case.
