Over 6.9 lakh students register for Karnataka II PU exam, 8.9 lakh for SSLC

Out of the 6.9 lakh, 3.3 lakh are boys and 3.6 lakh are girls. Meanwhile, in SSLC, 4.5 lakh are boys and 4.3 lakh are girls. The second PU examination will be conducted between March 1 and March 22 while the SSLC examination will be conducted between March 25 and April 6. The Karnataka State Examination and Assessment Board (KSEAB) has identified 1124 examination centres for the PU examination and 2747 centres for the SSLC examination.

This year, KSEAB will be conducting exams 1, 2 and 3 — a total of three annual examinations — for SSLC and second PUC students. The order to this effect was passed in 2023. With this, the school education department of Karnataka will be doing away with the concept of supplementary examination for SSLC and second PUC.

As a result, the KSEAB has made it mandatory for students to register for exam 1 to be eligible to appear for exams 2 and 3. The objective is to give a chance to the students to improve their overall performance in the examination following which the best scores among the three examinations will be considered for results.

Until now, if a student who has passed the second PU examination is not satisfied with the marks obtained, there is an opportunity to reject the marks obtained in the annual examination and only the marks obtained in the supplementary examination are considered the final marks of the student, without considering the marks obtained in the previous examination.

Dubbing it as a ‘student unfriendly mechanism’, it is on this basis that the board introduced a remedial system allowing the students to retain the best score obtained in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd examinations. When KSEAB introduced a third examination for second PU candidates in 2022-23, a whopping 1.19 lakh students registered out of which 41,961 students passed.

Further, the second PU examination this year is based on the 80+20 pattern which includes a written test for 80 marks and internal assessment for 20 marks. The same model has been adopted for SSLC since 2015-16.

This year, the board will distribute the same 80-mark question paper to both SSLC regular students and private candidates and the marks obtained by private candidates (for 80 marks) will be ‘scaled up’ to 100 marks and the results will be published.