Patna: Hundreds of thousands of students were left in a state of shock and despair once again after a huge 50 per cent of them failed to clear the Grade 10 examination conducted by the Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB), results of which were declared on Thursday. Authorities said the failure rate was due to strict invigilation at examination halls.

According to BSEB, a total of over 1.72 million students sat for the Grade 10 exam this year out of which 859,961 students failed the test.

The total pass percentage stood at 50.12 this year. Last year, 47 per cent of students had passed the class 10 Bihar board examination, authorities said.

Only 13.91 per cent of the students passed the examination with a first class mark.

Meanwhile, 26.88 per cent ranked in the second division, while the remaining 9.32 per cent who passed were in the third division.

Most of the toppers were from a government-run Simultala residential school located in Jamuio district of Bihar.

“The [pass] percentage remained low as we adopted a variety of measures to check use of unfair means in the examination. One of them was use of bar-coding system,” said BSEB chairman Anand Kishore who announced the exam result.

This is the second consecutive setback for students in the past two months.

Last month, 70 per cent of them had failed the class 12 examination, sparking protests across the state for days.

The protests subsided only after the government announced plans to re-evaluate their answer sheets and allow them for compartmental examination in two subjects.

A total of over 1.2 million students had appeared in the class 12 examination conducted by the Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) this year of which 794,622 failed to clear the test.

The students from the science stream received the worst-ever results, with only 30.11 per cent clearing test.

Likewise, only 37 per cent students passed the arts stream this time.

Authorities say the strict measures adopted by the state administration to stop cheating in the examination led to the drop in pass percentage.

Authorities took the real hard measures after taking a lesson from the lass time when many undeserving students had topped the merit chart.

The entire story which was later known as “Merit Scandal” came to fore when a local news channel interviewed Class 12 arts topper Ruby Rai.

During the interview, she failed to properly spell out the subjects she had studied and pronounced the Political Science as “Prodikal Science”.

Subsequently, the government called all the toppers for written interviews to test their knowledge but Ruby Rai skipped. Quite many toppers were later arrested, including Rai, even as the government cancelled their result and ordered an investigation into the merit scandal by a Special Investigation Team (SIT) which arrested around 40 persons in the case.