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State students stand out in CBSE examination

Sruthi Krishnan

Pass percentage in the Chennai region goes up to 92.06 from last year’s 91.75

— Photo: M. Vedhan

VICTORY DANCE: Students celebrating their success in the standard XII CBSE exam, in Chennai on Wednesday.

CHENNAI: Schools in the Chennai region affiliated to the Central Board of Secondary Education have reason to cheer – standard XII results announced on Wednesday show that the pass percentage has jumped to 92.06 from last year’s pass percentage of 91.75 (including both regular and private students).

Girls have performed better, with a pass percentage of 94.06, compared to boys who have a pass percentage of 90.4. A total of 822 schools in the Chennai region had students appearing for the CBSE examination.

The Chennai region comprises southern and western States, including Tamil Nadu and Puducherry. The performance of Tamil Nadu is higher than the region’s, with a pass percentage of 95.02.

The CBSE does not have a ranking system, but assigns grades based on a nine-point rating scale, explained N. Nagaraju, regional officer of the Board’s Chennai region. In every subject, the top 1/8th of the successful students are assigned A1 grade. The next 1/8th are assigned A2 and so on. Below 33 per cent is given an E grade, which is considered as fail, he said.

“There were no big issues with the 12th standard papers this year,” said Lakshmi Srinivasan, principal, P.S. Senior Secondary School, noting that the students of the school had performed as well as they had done in the past.

If a paper was found to be difficult, the marking scheme would be diluted accordingly, said G. Neelakantan, principal, Sir Sivaswami Kalalaya Senior Secondary School. This meant that a student expecting 92 per cent in physics could end up with 95 per cent, he said, citing an example.

The performance of students could be analysed only at the school-level as there was no overall ranking system in CBSE, said C. Satish, principal of DAV Boys’ School, Gopalapuram. Noting that some students had done well in the commerce stream, he said, that it had to act as an eye-opener for parents who preferred their children to get into the science stream.

Centums down

Overall, the number of centums had come down, especially in core subjects, Mr. Satish said. This put the students at a disadvantage, when they had to compete for admissions to engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu.

Mr. Neelakantan concurred with this observation. “Assuming someone has done very well in the science stream, they would score 298 or 299 in Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics,” he said, adding that there were not many cases of 300. But as professional courses in the State went by raw scores, with every mark a student loses, the rank could slide by an average of 1000, he said.

This is the reason why H. Rajagopal, a standard XII student from P.S. Senior Secondary School, is banking on cracking competitive exams such as AIEEE, IIT-JEE and BITSAT.

According to him, CBSE students have an edge when it comes to these exams because of the depth covered in the syllabus.

Despite these tensions, standard XII is the gateway to a dream career for many. “I want to travel in space,” said P. Purnima, from DAV Girls’ School, Gopalapuram. She planned to do aerospace engineering, and a career in research is what she would like.

But in the immediate future, most students have a single-point agenda – to relax. Just as S. Hariharan said talking about how he planned to spend the rest of the evening: “Out with friends.”

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