Only 15.4%: SSC repeaters fare badly yet again

The Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE) headquartered in the city,declared the results on Tuesday. Of 1,55,570 who appeared,only 23,958 passed the examination. In Pune district,only 3,674 of the 22,227 students who appeared passed. Most had failed in English and Mathematics in the examination held in March 2010 and could not clear the subjects in September/October too.

“Once students fail in SSC,they can neither move to college nor are welcome in schools. They start losing interest in studies and most of them,after one attempt at the repeaters’ examination,leave education. It should not happen,” said Shahaji Dhekane,MSBSHSE secretary.

When asked whether the board or the secondary education department is mulling training these students to improve results,Dhekane said the secondary education department might consider asking schools to take up responsibility of training these students,in the Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyaan.

When contacted,Digambar Deshmukh,director of secondary education department said the department could think on such lines in the interest of students.

He said if schools take up the responsibility of training these students they could be prevented from becoming dropouts. “There are some examples where initiatives on the part of schools have been fruitful. When I was education officer in Ahmednagar,I had appealed all schools to train students who had failed in SSC. Some schools took up the challenge and we trained around 200 such students for three months who eventually passed,” he said.

“There is a need to convince students that they had failed only in the examination. It is not that they do not know the subject. It can definitely boost their confidence,” said Dhekane.