Calcutta, June 4: The higher secondary exam results declared today recorded the sharpest drop in pass percentage in 14 years.

This year, 76.54 per cent of the students who took the HS exams passed, a drop of 4.24 per cent over last year’s figure. This is the first time since 1997 — when 4.47 per cent less students had passed than those in 1996 — that the HS pass percentage has dropped so sharply.

The West Bengal Council of Higher Secondary Education blamed the high percentage of failures this time on poor performance by students in subjects such as mathematics, political science, philosophy and economic geography.

“We need to find out if the 4,000-odd HS schools in the state are maintaining proper teaching standards,” said an official of the council.

The dip has prompted the authorities to question the Madhyamik board’s decision to fix 25 per cent as the pass mark in the Class X exams. The corresponding figure in the HS exams is 30 per cent.

“We need to find out if the Madhyamik board’s decision to bring down the pass mark from 34 to 25 in 2009 is behind the poor pass rate in the HS exams,” an official said.

A teacher said the HS course was “much more difficult” than that of the Madhyamik. “From the results, it appears that many students who passed the Madhyamik because of the low cut-off were unable to cope with the difficult HS course and the Class XII exam’s higher pass mark.”

HS council president Onkar Sadhan Adhikari said the pass percentage was the lowest in economic geography. While 92.44 per cent students had passed in the paper last year, the figure is 85.73 per cent this year. The drop of 6.71 per cent is the sharpest among all subjects over last year’s figures. The drop in mathematics is nearly 6 per cent. The dip in pass percentages in political science and philosophy are between 5 and 6 per cent.

A council official said that this year, 20,181 students did not appear for the exams even after filling up forms.