The combined pass rate of all the 10 Education Boards this year, including Madrasa and Vocational Education, has also declined to 80.35 percent from 88.29 percent last year. Similarly, the total number of GPA-5 achievers in the 10 Boards has fallen to 1,04,761 from 1,09,761 last year. The evaluation system followed in the past few years was faulty, but sudden policy shift, though quite justified to improve the quality of results has left many students unsuccessful. Students in the rural areas, who are deprived of quality teaching and educational facilities, are the worst victims of the new evaluation system.
Education Minister said the examination system is going through qualitative changes and the marking system of examination script has also been improved. Educationists were criticizing the high pass rate and increasing number of highest-grade achievers in public examinations. Scripts evaluation system has therefore witnessed significant improvement for marking. We welcome such slow going reforms while expecting that teaching methods and curriculum also need to be evaluated to make the system easier to students.
As per report the number of Educational Institution having less than 50 percent pass rate in the examinations tripled in three years while the number of educational institutions with zero percentage pass rate was also on the rise against the overall pass rate of 88-80 percent. The Statistics show the widening gap between urban and rural education standard as most of the institutions with 0-50 percent pass rate reported from rural areas.
Rural students cannot afford coaching, private tuition and do not get better guidance from parents at home and teachers at classrooms. With rural and urban divide in education getting wider the government’s claim that it was addressing the issue does not quite hold good.
To plug the urban-rural gap, we suggest that the government should train the teachers from rural schools as a first priority and arrange special care for English and Mathematics as most students have failed in those subjects. What is also significant is that the government policy shift must take schools on board to understand it and arrange teaching of students accordingly. There should not be any gap that may bring surprise to greater number of students to end up in failure.
