Morung Express News
Dimapur | May 10
The Nagaland Board of Schools Education (NBSE), on May 8, declared the results for HSLC and HSSLC showing one of the best performances in recent times.
However, when carefully scrutinised, it depicted a peculiar scenario – two separate criteria were applied to measure the same results.
For instance, for overall aggregates of the qualified students at the State level. For both government and private schools, the Board arrived at the percentage based on the number of students ‘enrolled for exam.’
But curiously for individual schools/district percentages, NBSE took ‘enrollment at start of the year’ as the parameter, regardless of whether a student had left school midway or dropped out during internal selection exam.
Consequently, huge discrepancies appear between individual school/district and State level aggregate figures.
Take, for instance, the case of performance of government schools – the State level pass percentage at 42.60 was based on ‘persons enrolled for exam’ while district wise data was based on ‘enrollment at start of the year.’
Thus, Kohima showed a pass percentage of 57%, which would have been 73.15% if calculated on the basis of ‘person enrolled for exam.’ Similar calculation was done for the individual school performances.
If the State level aggregates was done using the same parameters, the pass percentages of government schools would drastically drop from 42.60% to 31.32%. The average of private schools will also decrease from 86.74% to 77.17%.
This system has been followed for the past 3-4 years, sources informed.
Deliberate, says NBSE
When enquired with the apparent discrepancies in criteria followed to calculate the figures, NBSE Public Information Officer, Dziesevolie Tsürho said that it was deliberate.
Aggregate percentage is worked out from the actual number of students enrolled for the final exam, he informed. This was done “to discourage strict screening of students by the schools.”
“There are instances where the school admits/enrolls maximum students in the beginning of the year and many are screened out before final just to maintain percentage.”
