Sharp drop in number of students taking Madhyamik 2007

Mou Chakraborty
Kolkata, February 17, 2007

The Madhyamik roll may be longer this year, but the number of students actually taking the exam has seen a dramatic drop.
Students are required to register their names for the Madhyamik examination when they are in Class IX. When the batch of 2007 enrolled for the exam, the total number of candidates was 45,822 more than the year before. But things have changed in less than a year’s time and the number of examinees this year is less by 89,575.
The sharpest fall has left the state government and the Madhyamik board groping for reasons, specially after last year when the number of Madhyamik candidates had increased by 1,37,866.
Though many would credit high to the success of Sarva Shiksha Aviyan (SSA) as its first batch took the Madhyamik last year, school education minister Partha De does not completely agree. “It is true that the reason for abnormal increase in number of students last year was partly because of the SSA. But the main reason was that since it was the last year of Madhyamik in old syllabus, most schools did not want to detain students and for that reason the number of candidates had shot up.”
But what went wrong this year? Was it the increase in dropout rate among students after Class VIII? Or did candidates decided to drop a year because of the new syllabus?
“I would not say that the decrease in number of candidates taking the examination this year is abnormal. But without a probe, we will not be able to say why this happened. We will definitely probe the matter,” De said.
The Madhyamik board too failed to give a concrete explanation but dismissed the argument that the new syllabus could be one of the reasons. “Of all the detained students, only 3,471 students opted to take the exam in the old syllabus last year. Hence, the new syllabus cannot be the main reason,” said Ujjal Basu, president of the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education (WBBSE).
Instead, Basu said there could be many socio-economic factors contributing to the drop in the number of students taking the exam. “I have analysed the examination date of the last 30 years in an attempt find an answer to this puzzle but I am yet to decipher a steady pattern. It requires further study and cross verification from the socio-economic angle,” Basu said.
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