Mumbai: With the lowest registrations in the past five years, Maharashtra Board’s Class 10 Secondary School Certificate(SSC) exams are to commence on Thursday, March 2, 2023.
This year, the state has recorded 15.77 lakh student enrollments of which 8.44 lakh are boys, 7.33 lakh are girls, and a total of 73 students are transgender students.
Compared to last year a sharp drop of nearly 60,000 registrations was recorded in secondary exam enrollments all over the state, marking the lowest board examination registrations between academic years 2019-2022.
Attributing the student loss to pandemic-led migration, Principal Swapnil Jagatap of B.M.C’s Shastri Nagar School said, “We have heard several accounts of families migrating back to their hometowns after losing their means of earning during the pandemic. Things went back offline only in October last year and it would take at least another year to see our numbers go up again.”
With rampant learning loss during the pandemic, many academicians also believe that students are still finding the confidence to appear for a state-wide exam.
“Several children attended schools that could not provide proper online teaching and are still finding the confidence to be a part of competitive exams like boards. It will take time for them to get back into the academic cycle and cope with all the learning they have missed,” said Poonam Arora, Principal of Bombay Cambridge School.
Mumbai registrations remain unchanged
Despite the pandemic road bumps, the number of students enrolling from Mumbai has not seen a sharp change. A total of 3.54 lakh students are to appear from the Mumbai division, which includes Mumbai City, Thane, Palghar, and Raigad. At 1.16 lakh, the highest number of students hailed from Thane while the lowest came from South Mumbai at 30,850.
Students from 23,101 schools across Maharashtra have registered and the exams are to be administered by 5033 main centres in the state. With the exams flagged off alongside the board's ‘copy-free drive’, this year marks the first full-fledged Class 10 board exams since the pandemic.
The Maharashtra Board of Secondary Education will hold the Class 10 SSC exams in two shifts. The first shift will begin at 11 a.m. and the second shift will begin at 3 p.m. Starting this year, the ten minutes assigned to reading time have been taken away and have been added toward the end of the exam, making each paper 2 hours 10 minutes long.
