Karnataka recorded the highest ever pass percentage in the second pre-university examination since the inception of the board more than four-and-a-half decades ago. Of the 6.71 lakh students who sat for the examination last month, 4.14 lakh cleared it, putting the pass percentage at 61.73.
The results were announced on Monday by S.R. Umashankar, Principal Secretary of the Department of Primary and Secondary Education.
The performance of students in the II PU exam had been in a slump since 2017 after a decision was taken not to award grace marks at the evaluation stage. However, sources in the department said most question papers this year were easy, which helped give a boost to students.
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As is the case every year, girls, with a pass percentage of 68.24, outperformed boys (55.29%). Rural colleges, too, put up a better showing than their urban counterparts, with a pass percentage of 62.88.
The maximum number of students to clear the exam were in the science stream (66.58%), followed closely by commerce (66.39%). The Arts stream recorded the lowest pass percentage at 50.53. The pass percentage for English-medium students was 66.9 %, while for Kannada-medium students it was 55.08%.
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The highest number of passes were from Udupi district where 92.2 % of the total students who appeared cleared the examination. Chitradurga district with 51.42 % had the poorest performance.
Olvita Ancilla D’Souza from Alva’s PU College, Moodbidri, and Shrikrishna Sharma K. from Sathyasai Lokaseva PU College, Alike, topped the commerce stream bagging 596 out of 600 marks. Kusuma Ujjini from Indu Independent PU College stood first in Arts and Rajath Kashyap S. from Kumaran’s Composite PU in science. Both scored 594 marks.