Mumbai: Four municipal school students scored above 90% in the Secondary School Certificate examinations, but the pass percentage in the city's 49 civic schools was lower this time as compared to 2008. While 72.27% students had managed to clear the examinations in 2008, the number dropped to 60% this year.

Last year, 6,019 students had appeared for the examination, and 4,350 had cleared it. This year, while the number of students appearing for the examination increased to 7,912, only 4,753 managed to pass.

Civic officials attribute this drop to the fact that they had been easy on students in the ninth standard and had promoted almost all of them to the tenth standard. We did not want to detain students in Class 9. We wanted to see if they fare well. If a student is failed in Class 9 when all his counterparts go to Class 10 it brings his confidence down. But this doesn't seem to have worked. We will see about next year, said Chandrakant Rokde, deputy municipal commissioner.

But there were bright spots as well. Nitesh Padatkar of Byculla Municipal School, the city topper in the category, scored 92.15%, followed by Vinita Velvankar of Malad's Topiwala School with 91.76%, and Vijay Bhange of Byculla Municipal School with 90.46%. We had also started a special batch last year where we gave separate training to some kids. Of that batch, Nilesh Karkar from Prabhadevi Municipal School scored 90.15%, said Ujjwala Modhak, member of the education committee.

Additional municipal commissioner Madhav Sangle said the objective of municipal schools was to get maximum students to appear for the Secondary School Certificate examination. Our students are from very underprivileged sections of society. They need to clear the Secondary School Certificate to get any job. Some of them go on to do extremely well. For such exceptional students, we are even introducing three junior colleges, he added.