After witnessing a marginal increase in Secondary School Leaving Certificate (SSLC) examinations for two consecutive years, Madurai district recorded a dip in 2017 with a pass percentage of 94.63 % as per results announced on Friday.
With the decrease of 1.05 percentage points from 95.68 % in 2016, the district has slid from 13th rank across Tamil Nadu as per pass percentage in 2016 to 18th rank this year. Of the 42,803 students who took the examination this year, 40,503 had cleared it.
Although girls outperformed boys in accordance with the trend prevailing for past many years, the pass percentage of both boys and girls came down - from 93.89 % and 97.53 % in 2016 to 92.70 % and 96.59 % in 2017. Barring Kallar Reclamation Schools, which have managed to retain the pass percentage around the same value, all the other schools, including matriculation, government, corporation and aided schools, have witnessed a decline in pass percentage compared to 2016.
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The sharpest decline was seen among Adi Dravidar Welfare Schools where the pass percentage reduced almost nine percentage points from 89.10 % in 2016 to 80.86 % in 2017. However, the total number of students who took part in the examination from these schools were just 209.
Significantly, the fully aided schools, which accounted for more than one-fourth of the students, witnessed a decline of 1.76 percentage points from 95.24 % in 2016 to 93.48 % in 2017, thereby contributing considerably for the decline in overall pass percentage.
The pass percentage among matriculation schools, which accounted for another one-fourth of students, reduced from 99 % in 2016 to 98.58 % in 2017.
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The pass percentage among government and Madurai Corporation schools stood at 90.48 % and 94.67 %, a decline of 1.5 and 1.12 percentage points from 2016 respectively.
The number of schools in the district which recorded cent per cent pass decreased considerably - from 212 in 2016 to just 180 in 2017. Of these, 23 were government schools and nine were corporation schools while 108 were matriculation schools.
None of the students had scored centum in English or Tamil. A total of 3,565 students had scored centum marks in the other three subjects, which is again marginally lower than the 3,716 centums in 2017.
Keeping with last year’s trend, Social Sciences subject had the highest number of centum scorers this year (2,567), followed by Mathematics (608) and Science (390).