Late last year, Karnataka announced it would hold Board examinations three times in an academic year for Classes 10 and 12, giving all students, whether they passed or failed, up to two chances to improve their performance. Data from the unique experiment for the 2023-2024 session now shows that science subjects have the highest share of repeat takers.

The highest number of Class 12 students retaking the state Board (or II PU) exams the second time to improve their scores were in Physics (21,646), followed by Chemistry (17,948), Mathematics (14,875), English (7,253), and Biology (7,015). These represent 8%, 7%, 6%, 1%, and 3% of the original cohort for each subject, respectively. A much smaller number attempted a third retake, shows data from the Karnataka School Examination and Assessment Board (KSEAB), the first in India to offer multiple Board exams annually for Classes 10 and 12.

Karnataka became the first state to implement a key recommendation of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which advocates allowing students up to two opportunities in a school year to take Board exams.

In the 2023-24 academic season, Board Exam 1 was held in March-April with results in May, Exam 2 in June with results in July, and Exam 3 in August with results the same month. Students had the option of sitting for one Board exam, two or all three. There was no cap on the number of subjects a student could attempt, and a student’s final result reflects the highest score achieved across all attempts. For instance, if a student scored 60% in Exam 1, 75% in Exam 2 and 65% in Exam 3, her final score in the subject would be 75%.

Among those retaking exams a second time, more than half (or 65%) of Physics candidates, 62% of English candidates, 40% of Chemistry candidates, 60% of Mathematics candidates, and 25% of Biology candidates succeeded in increasing their marks in the respective subjects in Exam 2.

In Class 10 (or the SSLC exam), only around 2.2% (or 13,948) of the 6.3 lakh candidates who passed the first exam chose to appear for the second exam to improve their marks. Of them, around 7,821 students – over half (or 56%)of those who appeared for improvement – were able to improve their marks. An even smaller number (or 825) who passed Exam 1 and Exam 2, chose to take Exam 3 as well. Of these students, less than half – around 45% (374 students) — saw an improvement in marks in Exam 3.

The additional attempts at the Class 10 Board exam led to an increase in the overall pass percentage from 73.28% in Exam 1 to 81.65%.

Karnataka became the first state to implement a key recommendation of the NEP 2020, which advocates allowing students up to two opportunities in a school year to take Board exams — one main and one for improvement — as a way to ease student stress. Other Boards, including CBSE, have been grappling with the logistics of implementing this change.

Acknowledging that the response to the additional exam attempts was below expectations, KSEAB Chairperson N Manjushree told The Indian Express, “Since it was the first year, there was some miscommunication by a few people suggesting that the lower score in the repeat exams would count… this created some apprehensions. Perhaps we couldn’t reach enough students to clarify that this option was available, given it was the first year of the Exam 1, 2, 3 pattern.”

Manjushree explained that the decision to introduce multiple Board exams was based on last year’s experience of holding a second supplementary exam for Class 12 students who had failed. “Usually, we conduct only one supplementary exam. Last year, we ran a drive to register those who failed, for a second supplementary exam. Around 95,000 students registered, and about 80,000 took the exam. Of them, more than 30,000 passed. This meant that many students who would otherwise have had to wait another year could clear the exam and pursue higher education. That positive outcome encouraged us to implement three exams for both Class 10 and Class 12 this year.”

Previously, KSEAB offered only one supplementary exam for Class 10 and 12 students, with no option to choose the best of two scores.

Discussing the logistics of conducting three Board exams a year, she explained that multiple sets of question papers were prepared before Exam 1. Exam 2 results were structured to allow candidates to choose their best score from the first two attempts for admissions through the Karnataka Common Entrance Test.

This system of three exams will be offered in the 2024-25 academic session as well. “Next year, we want to complete all three exams by June so that academic loss can be limited. We had to do a lot of planning in terms of registering the evaluators, and getting them to the evaluation centres. If the evaluation is done in time, this helps in sticking to the tight schedule of conducting Exam 2 and 3. The learning this year will be to have a good, achievable schedule of timetable, evaluation, processing of results and following it up three times,” she added.