Kerala has produced the best Class X results while Haryana the worst among the state boards. With a pass rate of 98.1%, which is close to the ICSE board’s 98.54%, God’s Own Country has been a paradise for students. Haryana, on the other end, could register a pass rate of just over 57%.
Many more 16-year-olds walked out of school this year as performance improved in several states, just like in the case of the two national boards — while ICSE’s improvement was marginal, CBSE’s was substantial, going up from 86.9% in 2018 to 91.1% this year. Experts say that the historically orthodox state boards have been looking at ‘big brother CBSE and ICSE’ and inflating results so that their students don’t miss out on getting into better colleges. They say the matter calls for introspection as there’s a mismatch between performance at lower grades and Class X.
Bucking the upward trend were Maharashtra, where the pass rate plummeted by 12.3%, and Madhya Pradesh, where it dropped by 4.7%. Most southern states saw the pass rate cross the 90% mark, but moving up the Vidhyas, it starts dropping below 70%.
“If one looks at the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), 50% of Class VIII kids can only answer questions that are at a level of 2nd or 3rd grade. And then you find that in Class X, 70% or 90% children are passing. It tells a story of something terribly wrong in the way we are building our children’s learning levels,” said N Govinda, a former head of the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration.
“Unless we seriously work on building basic learning abilities from the early grades, and then become more honest in representing Std X results without high grace marks or moderation, we will never get to know what the reality is,” he said.
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So, what do the Class X results indicate about the country’s teenagers? “Class X marks are irrelevant and tell us really nothing about a student’s learning level. It is a sort of a wild guess on where a child stands as compared to others,” said Vasant Kalpande, former chairman of Maharashtra’s SSC board.
The disadvantage the state boards have, according to experts, is numbers. “The number of students CBSE has in the entire country for their Class X exams, we have in the state,” said Basanti Roy, former secretary of Maharashtra state board’s Mumbai division. For example, this year, 28.4 lakh students took the Class X board exam in UP, as opposed to 17 lakh students who appeared for the CBSE exam nationwide. “Also, in CBSE and ICSE schools, the curriculum is uniform and so is the quality of teachers. But when it comes to state boards, there is a lot of difference between rural and urban schools,” Roy said.
Further, in Maharashtra, principals said, the board’s success rate took a hit as internal marking (20 marks) in languages and social sciences was discontinued. “Internal marks is not for inflating results, but to ensure holistic evaluation. The board must consider students who cannot best express themselves in a written test. This will also help the board improve performance,” said Rohan Bhat, principal of a Mumbai school.
