Over 10 lakh students, out of 66 lakh registered for the Uttar Pradesh board examinations, have reportedly failed to appear in the last four days.
As per media reports, the dropout rate is twice the previous year (2017), when around 5 lakh chose to not appear for the examinations.
On the first day of exams, more than 1.8 lakh students did not appear for the examinations
“It included over 53,100 high schools and over 1.27 lakh intermediate students,” said, Deputy Director Education Vikas Srivastava on Wednesday.
This is seen as an outcome of the tight screening and anti-copying measures implemented by the government which had vowed to ensure there was no copying this year.
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Earlier, the officials in the Secondary Education Department had said that the strictness had led to students aborting the exams midway including in subjects like Hindi and home science.
Deputy Chief Minister Dinesh Sharma, who is in charge of education, had said that the government was committed to ensuring merit in the education system and at no cost will copying be allowed.
“We will not allow anyone to copy, cheat and usurp the right of meritorious students,” he added.
Sharma is using the state government chopper to make surprise inspections at various examination centres to ensure that the government order is being implemented.
CCTVs have been installed in all examination centres and the special task force (STF) of the Uttar Pradesh Police is being used to help conduct free and fair exams.
A total of 66,37,018 students were registered to appear in this year’s UP board exam. These include 36,55,691 appearing for Class 10 exams and 29,81,327 students for Class 12 exams. The board are set to continue till 12 Mrach.
Last year, the overall pass percentage for Class 10 was recorded at 81.18 per cent and in Class 12, 82.62 per cent students were declared successful.
(with agency inputs)