BENGALURU: Around 25,000 students, who signed up for the Secondary School Leaving Certificate (SSLC) exams but did not appear for them, should be tracked down and asked the reason for being absent, school management representatives have said.
The exams, which began on 21 March, will end on 4 April this year and officials suspect that most of the missing students have not been allowed to attend the exams as they were not given hall tickets by the schools. Examinations for five subjects have been completed so far.
These kind of unwilling absentees form the major chunk of missing students, according to an official. Bangalore South and Kalaburagi top the list of districts with the most absentees with 2,224 and 1,800 students not showing up for the exams respectively. “We have observed these cases in the past as well. However, if they don’t come forward and complain, we cannot act on the same,” the official said.
Another reason for the large number of absentees according to officials is the efforts by some schools to submit inflated lists with the names of fake students in order to get their school chosen as an examination centre or to attract government grants.
This practice, while prevalent in the past, has reduced in recent times as students are identified by their Aadhar card according to D Shashi Kumar, General Secretary of the Associated Management of Primary and Secondary Schools in Karnataka. “It is a question of survival for aided schools and so they show fake students. If a school has less than 25 students, they do not get government grants,” he explained. While it is difficult to enroll fake candidates now, those previously enrolled continue to be counted, he said.
The association has even demanded that the authorities identify such schools and issue notices to them. “The schools which deny hall tickets for low performers are negligible. The department must track down these missing students and seek an explanation from them,” Kumar said. Last year, 1.4 lakh fake enrolments were identified during the SSLC exams.