Chennai region recorded a pass percentage of 99 in the Class X board exam results announced by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) on Monday.
The region, which encompasses Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Goa, Puducherry, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Daman and Diu was behind the Trivandrum region, which recorded a pass percentage of 99.85 — the highest in the country.
B. Kaviya Varshini, a student of Vidhya Niketan Public School, Coimbatore, who secured 497 marks, found a place in the list of 97 toppers from across the country.
In the Chennai region, girls recorded a pass percentage of 99.39, which was slightly higher than that of the boys, who recorded a pass percentage of 98.70.
City toppers
In Chennai, school heads said that they were happy with the results. Two students from the city found a place in the list of State toppers.
P. Kavisha, a student of Chinmaya Vidyalaya, Virugambakkam scored 496 marks with centums in mathematics, Sanskrit and social science. “I preferred to study on my own instead of going for tuitions and this helped me a lot,” she said. Since her favourite subject is mathematics, Kavisha said that she would be pursuing commerce with maths for the next two years.
Staying off social media and putting in extra effort in the three months leading up to the examinations helped immensely, said Rhea Joseph, a student of Chennai Public School, Anna Nagar. With a total score of 495 marks, Rhea scored full marks in maths and French as well as 99 marks in social science and science.
“Writing revision exams before the boards too facilitated our preparations better,” she added.
E. Shivani, a student of Trinity International School in Namakkal, too found a place on the State toppers list with a score of 495 marks.
Of the 17.61 lakh students who appeared for the board exam from across the country, nearly 2.25 lakh students scored above 90%.
Difficulty level
During the course of the exam, concerns were raised by parents and students about the disparity in the difficulty levels of the three sets of question papers in social science.
“Instead of having completely different questions, a change in the order of questions would be adequate across sets. Care should be taken to ensure that there is no big difference in the difficulty levels across sets as this is extremely unfair for the students.” said P. Ashok Shankar, secretary of the CBSE schools management association.