Hundreds of students who have failed in the Intermediate exam this year blocked Buddha Marg outside the Bihar School Examination Board office on Monday.
Three Left-wing students' unions -All India Students Federation (AISF), All India Students' Association (AISA), and All India Democratic Students' Organisation (AIDSO) - joined the roughly three-and-half-hour protest that began around 10am.
The protesters shouted slogans against the chief minister, the education minister and the board chairman.
Police caned some students when the demonstration turned unruly.
Many students held similar protests on the Patna University campus and the Magadh University extension office in Rajendra Nagar, where members of Madhepura MP Pappu Yadav's Jan Adhikar Morcha joined in.
Members of Bhartiya Janata Yuva Morcha, the BJP's youth wing, also staged protests in front of the offices of district education officers (DEOs) across the state, alleging irregularities in the Intermediate exam.
Morcha state unit president Nitin Navin - also the Bankipore MLA - led the protest in Patna and locked up the DEO's office for a bit.
Nearly two out of three students who took the Intermediate exam this year failed, and the authorities have said it was because of strict anti-cheating measures enforced.
The board has said that the over 8 lakh students who have failed can apply online for scrutiny of their answer sheets and results will be declared within a month.
The students, however, are demanding re-checking of their answer sheets.
"In scrutiny, only re-totalling of marks is done and marks is given for those questions where the examiner has missed to give marks," said Anil Kumar, a student of RK Dwarika College at Lohianagar in Patna who was among the protesters on Buddha Marg. "But our demand is re-checking of entire copies as the evaluator who has evaluated the copies has not evaluated them correctly."
Anil has failed in the examination in the science stream.
"The main reason behind such a large number of students failing in the examination is that Intermediate answer sheets were evaluated by primary school teachers," said Sushil Kumar, the state general secretary of the AISF who led the protest outside the board office.
"These teachers are not very qualified," he added.
Board chairman Anand Kishor has, however, said that the primary teachers chosen all had postgraduate degrees and evaluated the copies with the help of model answer keys.
Notice to schools
Patna police have taken Intermediate arts topper Ganesh Kumar, arrested for alleged age fraud, on two-day remand.
"Police have gathered some vital information from Ganesh," said Patna senior superintendent of police (SSP) Manu Maharaaj, who is supervising the probe.
The SSP said Ganesh, who was living in the state capital's Mussalahpur Haat area, came in contact with a middleman - Sanjay Kumar, who has been arrested - who helped him procure a fake birth certificate.
In 2015, Ganesh, a resident of Giridih in Jharkhand, had mentioned his date of birth as June 2, 1993 in the affidavit submitted to the Sanjay Gandhi High School in Samastipur where he passed his matriculation from.
Ganesh is allegedly 1975-born.
"The broker Sanjay told police that he had helped more than a dozen students in procuring fake birth certificates," SSP Maharaaj said.
The board has served show-cause notices to Sanjay Gandhi High School and RSJN Inter College in Samastipur - from where Ganesh took the Intermediate - on why the schools didn't check Ganesh's age certificate before enrolling him, said a source in the board.
The board has time and again asked schools to check the age certificate of students appearing for Intermediate and matriculation examinations, the source added.
