Mita Mukherjee

Ninety percent of this year’s unsuccessful candidates of West Bengal Higher Secondary examinations who had complained about “errors in marks calculation” were declared successful after reviewing their complaints, the state Higher Secondary education council said.

The aggrieved students can collect the revised mark sheets from their respective schools on July 30, Mahua Das, president of West Bengal Council of Higher Secondary Education said on Tuesday.

“Several failed candidates had claimed that they deserved qualifying marks. We have reviewed the results of those examinees. On the basis of an instruction from the government, their cases were considered with sympathy. They have been promoted and they can collect the revised mark sheets from the schools on July 30,” said Das.

The council will also review the results of the remaining 10 per cent unsuccessful candidates if the schools approach the council with their cases with relevant documents.

A series of agitations by the unsuccessful examinees protesting errors in this year’s Higher Secondary results had put the state government in a spot.

The government on Saturday decided to intervene and address the students’ grievances realizing that if the state-wide agitation by unsuccessful examinees continued, it would send a wrong message about the entire tabulation process adopted by the council for assessing the students this year.

K. Dwivedi, the chief secretary of West Bengal on Saturday summoned Das and asked her to review students’ complaints about receiving lower marks in the Class XII board exam.

Senior officials of the government including district magistrates were asked to talk to agitating students to  hear their grievances and assure them that their grievances would be addressed.

 Thousands of unsuccessful Higher Secondary candidates staged protests at several places in Kolkata including in front of the residence of state education minister Bratya Basu and in various districts in the state since the publication of the Higher Secondary results on last Thursday with a demand to declare them successful.

Das on Tuesday said, failed candidates from nearly 150 Higher Secondary schools had complained about anomalies in the result preparation process and demanded that they should be declared successful.

Several students had claimed that they had failed because of errors in the calculation. Many others had complained that they were unsuccessful because their performance in Class XI was not taken into account for calculating the final marks of the Class XII board exam.

 All the students who were enrolled for the 2021 Class XII board exam were granted automatic promotion from Class XI to XII last year.

After reviewing the results of the aggrieved candidates, the council found that though these students were  promoted to Class XII, they had actually scored less than the qualifying marks in the Class XI annual exam.

The council prepared the results by giving 40 per cent weightage to a student’s performance in the Class X board exams and 60 per cent to the performance in the Class XI annual exams. The final score was arrived at by adding the two scores to the marks obtained in the practical or project work marks.       

According to Das, the aggrieved candidates scored less than the qualifying marks in the Class XII exam as the results were prepared on the basis of the marks provided by the schools.

Many aggrieved candidates had claimed the council should not have taken the actual marks of Class XI exam into consideration because the government had taken the policy to grant promotion.

According to council officials, around 18,000 candidates out of a total of 819,202 students who enrolled in the Class XII board exam this year were unsuccessful.

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