Mumbai: The results of Secondary School Certificate (SSC) examination on Monday brought cheers to high schoolers across Maharashtra, which recorded its one of the best success rates in the state board exams. While the current batch fared better than their seniors in most of the subjects, it's the vernacular languages such as Hindi, Marathi and Urdu that boosted their performances.
The pass percentage of these subjects – as both the first language as well as the second and third language – climbed up a few notches. The improvement becomes more joyful as usually more students fail in these papers. The increase in the success rate in Hindi as a first language from 90.26% to 93.91% is one of the highlights of this year's results.
On the other hand, the success rate in English (first language), which most of the students manage to pass usually, increased only marginally from 98.01% to 98.12%. “The students at our school have surprisingly done well in Hindi and Marathi, while the scores in Science have dropped,” said Khar's BPM high school principal Beena Menon.
Following a continuous decline over the last five years, the number of registrations for the SSC exams rose this year to 16.09 lakh. In the Mumbai division, around 3.64 lakh students, 12,000 more than last year, had signed up for the test, which was carried out between March 1 and 22. These include 1.9 lakh boys and 1.74 lakh girls.
This is the second year after Covid when the exams were conducted without any pandemic-era relaxations. The schools believe that the improved results indicate that the students have managed to overcome the learning loss they faced during the pandemic.
“The last year's batch had suffered a lot as they had just begun to go back to normalcy after Covid. This year, the children have done well despite being at home during their foundational classes,” said Bandra's St Stanislaus school principal Arockiammal Anthony.
Rizwana Satare from Anjuman-I-Islam’s Allana English high school at Fort, suggested that increased use of digital tools is also one of the factors behind the record results. “The students are able to understand even abstract concepts better, thanks to the digital equipment deployed in the classrooms,” she said.
The Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE) has managed to assess the class 10 papers earlier than the previous two years when the results were released on June 2 and June 17, respectively. It has achieved this feat despite many of the teachers being engaged in election-related work.
“This is an appreciable effort on part of the board as the late results would have delayed the class 11 admissions. This leads to academic sessions getting truncated and junior colleges not getting enough time to teach,” said Sudhir Ghagas, headmaster, Padmashri Annasaheb Jadhav Vidyalaya, Bhiwandi.
