Why is 90% plus club shrinking? It’s a tricky one for academics too

Nagpur: The SSC 90%-plus scorers club getting reduced by almost half in Nagpur division led to quite a brainstorming in the city’s education circle. Many academics reached out to TOI with their theories as to what might have gone wrong.
TOI on Saturday published a report which mentioned that the number of students in Nagpur division scoring 90% and above is less than 3,000 as compared to 5,000 a year ago.


Damodar Thombre, principal of Somalwar school (Nikalas branch) said, “I checked the data for 90%-plus scorers in all divisions and found some interesting things. I scoured the official data from the board’s web site, and not from random sources. Nagpur’s drop (in 90%-plus scorers) is quite sharp when we compare it to other divisions. So, one must seriously think about why this has happened. Even many schools did not anticipate such a decline.”
All schools get a fairly decent idea about their 90%-plus scorers on the basis of prelim exams. This not only helps them gauge the overall scenario of the upcoming results but also identify potential merit students who can then be helped more to cross the optimum threshold.
A school principal, who wished not to be named, said, “The data regarding the anticipated number of top scorers we had collected based on our internal assessment was in complete contrast with the actual results. It seems that the evaluation for Nagpur division was stricter this year. Barring that, it’s difficult to understand why our students failed to score high marks.”
TOI was contacted by another teacher whose student was among the top scorers in the city, and she felt the drop could also be attributed to parents. “Students who were in Std VIII during the pandemic, now appeared for their SSC exams. These students were not able to transition normally to board exam level because they spent a lot of their time at home, due to schools being shut. Here parents had a greater role to play, but unfortunately children got ignored,” she said.
The teacher further explained her stance saying that till Std VIII these students cannot be ‘failed’. “Due to RTE provisions, in our state we cannot fail students for poor academic performance. Such students then get pushed to IX, which was when the world was slowly coming out of the pandemic’s grip. Everybody went easy on the students, and as a result they were not fully prepared for the 2023 board exams,” the teacher said.