Though Dakshina Kannada’s position in Class 10 results slipped from second to fourth in the State, there is a marked improvement in the pass percentage of students in the district when compared to last year.
The district recorded a pass percentage of 85.56 this year against 82.30% registered last year. As many as 24,014 students of the total 28,068 students cleared the examination this year.
M.R. Ravi, Chief Executive Officer, Zilla Panchayat, Dakshina Kannada, and Y. Shivaramaiah, Deputy Director of Public Instruction, said improvement in the result this year reflected the committed work of teachers. “Our focus was on reducing the number of failures and we have succeeded,” said Mr. Ravi, who took the initiative of holding preparatory classes through video conference at the State Institute for Rural Development (SIRD) in Mysuru. “It’s not only our students but around 40,000 from other districts have benefited from these classes held between January 17 and March 3,” he said.
Mr. Shivaramaiah said: “We had special classes for slow learners after schools hours,” he said and thanked the support of NGO Jamiyyatul Falah, which held classes in science and mathematics to make students understand difficult concepts, formulas and calculations. With all these efforts the number of failures in the examination this year has reduced to 4,054. As many as 5,283 students had failed in the examination in 2017, he said.
The focus on slow learners in the district started in January 2014 with the Mission 95+ programme. Apart from holding special classes after school, teachers made sure to call students early in the morning to study. This led to pass percentage of 79.31 and district being ranked at 29.
Changes were made to the programme in 2014 when experts were involved to bring out modules for each subject to help students get minimum passing marks. Slow learners were prepared to answer questions in these modules. This led to district achieving pass percentage of 89.35 in 2015 and it was ranked eight.
This mode of preparation helped achieve pass percentage of 88.12 in 2016 when students of Class 10 faced examination based on the syllabus that was on par with the CBSE (Central Board for Secondary Education). This programme has continued till now.
