‘Unnatural spike’ in pass percentage at SPPU, combined passing formula likely reason

EVEN AS the SPPU became one of only two state universities to hold offline exams in a bid to ‘rationalise’ the results which had inflated unrealistically during the two year Covid period, the idea didn’t seem to have worked. As the results of the semester exams held in June-July are being declared, a clear trend which has emerged is that the results have shown an overall increase in pass percentage by 30 to 40 per cent across different faculties as compared to the same results in the pre-Covid era.

While the difficulty level of the question paper remained the same, it is the Combined Passing decision of the university, taken only for these semester exams, which are being pointed out as the reason for the inflation in numbers. For the last two years, all examinations were being held in an online manner and as a result, the passing percentage across faculties had increased to over 90-95 percent average passing in almost all faculties, raising suspicion over the quality of examinations being conducted as well as concerns of cheating.

As schools and colleges were finally permitted to resume offline lectures, the administration of SPPU passed a resolution to conduct the examinations in the offline pen-paper mode, similar to how it was being conducted pre-pandemic.  “Only two state universities, Amravati University and SPPU, decided to conduct all the examinations offline. The main idea was to maintain the sanctity of examinations,” said Mahesh Kakade, director, examinations and evaluation department, SPPU.