May 7, 2014, 12:55 pm
Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has provided a breather for those students who flunked in Class IX exams because of poor performance in their summative assessments (SA). A recent circular uploaded on the website said the students would get one more chance to improve their scores of SA by July this year and save themselves from year loss.
A city school principal said, "The board had made 25% passing marks mandatory from 2013-14 session. We implemented the rule and asked failures to repeat Std IX. Parents went berserk and pressured us to talk to the board, but we told them rules were rules. We took flak from the parents for playing by the rules and now, a month later, the board says the rules have changed." Results for Std IX are declared individually by schools, usually around last week of March.
Affected schools say when they started contacting parents with the new rule book, they are being given the "I-told-you-so" lecture. Another principal said, "My teachers have to listen to the unending spiel from furious parents. Everyone blames us for not taking initiative of putting pressure on CBSE early on and, in the process, wasting a month." The delay the parents talk about relates specifically to Std X classes that start in April. Another teacher said, "Those who cleared the Std IX exams started attending Std X classes that begin in April, before the vacations officially begin. The failed students missed out on this which is making parents more furious. Had the CBSE informed us in March itself, all this could have been avoided."
