College admission rankings that depend on Class 12 marks are likely to have much higher cut-offs this year, with a huge spike in the number of students scoring high marks in this year’s Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) examinations.
Students who scored 95% or above were part of an elite group of just 17,693 in 2019, less than 1.5% of all candidates. In 2020, a year when the examinations were disrupted by COVID-19, that figure more than doubled, with 38,686 students scoring above 95%, according to CBSE data.
The number of students who scored above 90% also increased from about 94,000 students in 2019 to almost 1.6 lakh in 2020. For universities and colleges which use Class 12 marks for their admission procedures, this means that a larger number of high-scoring applicants are likely to push cut-offs to higher levels than usual.
The overall pass percentage was also higher than the previous year, with 88.8% of students passing the exam in comparison to 83.4% in 2019.
Cancelled papers
For subjects that were cancelled due to the pandemic, marks were calculated on the basis of students’ performance in the completed papers, using an assessment scheme approved by the Supreme Court. Only a third of the 12 lakh candidates were able to complete all papers. No merit list of toppers was announced this year.
The results of 400 students could not be computed using the assessment scheme, and were not announced, the CBSE said in a statement.
Students who wish to improve their scores in papers that were cancelled will be allowed to write an optional examination, which will be held as soon as conditions are conducive, as determined by the Central government. Those results will be treated as final for those who take this option.
No “Fail”
The CBSE decided to avoid using the term “Fail” in any of the results sent to students or declared on its website, and has replaced it with the term “Essential Repeat”. Compartment examination schedules will also be announced later, in consultation with the Centre.
As has been the trend in recent years, girls performed better than boys with a 92% pass percentage this year. More than 86% of boys passed the exam.
Students from the southern region performed best in the exams, with Thiruvananthapuram, Bengaluru and Chennai all recording a pass percentage of more than 95%. More than 94% of Delhi students passed the examination, despite the fact that some students in north east Delhi wrote only one or two papers, due to violence in the area causing additional cancellations in February.
Websites crash
All the three CBSE websites created to access the Class 12 results crashed on Monday afternoon, frustrating anxious students.
The cbseresults.nic.in website began functioning only around 6 p.m., although the overall results were announced just past noon, while the cbse.nic.in site remained difficult to access. The results.nic.in website continued to offer this message: “Our servers are facing a temporary technical problem. We regret the inconvenience caused.”
CBSE’s official Twitter handle blamed the National Informatics Centre for the website failures, saying there was a “technical issue” in accessing the results. “However, complete results have been sent to all schools and students can obtain their results from schools”, said the CBSE tweet.
However, schools are closed due to the pandemic, and several school administrators said they had been taken by surprise as they had not been informed in advance of the declaration of results.
The IVRS telephone number provided by the CBSE was not reachable for many students, while the Digilocker site providing detailed results only said, “Mark sheet generation is in progress. To be available shortly”.
A CBSE spokesperson noted that students could also view their results on the Umang mobile app.
