IANS/New Delhi

Girls once again performed better than boys in the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) Class 12 results announced yesterday.
Delhi girl M Gayatri topped the examination with 99.2% marks - 496 out of 500.
The second spot was shared by three students - a Noida girl, a boy from Delhi and another from Kerala who all scored just a mark less than the overall topper.
The overall pass percentage of girls this year stands at 87.56, while it is 77.77 for boys.
“You can see the difference (between the pass percentage of girls and boys) is more than 9.79%. So, as usual, girls have outscored boys this year as well,” said Rama Sharma, public relations officer of CBSE.
“There were 10.4 lakh candidates who appeared in the exam this year, which was 1.2% more than the past year. The pass percentage of 2015 is 82, which is marginally lower than that of last year which was 82.70,” she added.
Overall, the CBSE’s Thiruvananthapuram region recorded the highest pass percentage of 95.41, followed by Chennai (91.14). Chennai’s pass percentage last year was 91.63.
Delhi stood third with an overall pass percentage of 86.13. Delhi’s pass percentage for boys was 81.59 and 90.87 for girls. Of the 266,661 registered students in Delhi, 263,361 students appeared for the exam, of whom 226,838 passed.
Gayatri, a commerce student of New Green Field School in Delhi’s Saket area, emerged the topper.
Pratima Prabhakar, principal of New Green Field School, said: “Teachers and students of the school had put in a lot of effort to produce good results. I am very proud of Gayatri. She was the gem of the school.”
Prabhakar said the overall results of the school were impressive.
The second spot was shared by Noida student Mythili Mishra, B Arjun from Pattom in Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, and Saurabh Bhambri, a student from Delhi’s Greater Kailash area. All three scored 99% - 495 out of the total 500 marks.
Reenu Singh, principal of Amity International School where Mythili Mishra studied said: “We are on top of the world. We had worked with consistency to achieve this. Scoring marks like these can be done only when one wants to achieve perfection.”
Singh congratulated the students and said the overall national pass percentage was good this year.
The highest ever marks achieved in Class 12 CBSE were 99.6%, by Sarthak Aggarwal last year.
Last year, Delhi recorded an overall pass percentage of 86.78.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated “all my young friends who have successfully passed the CBSE Class 12 board exam.”
The performance of Delhi’s government schools was the best in the country among all government schools as 88.22% of their students cleared the exams. However, Delhi’s figure was 88.78% in 2014.
Delhi was followed by Ajmer region where the government schools had a pass percentage of 86.11, compared to 86.63 last year.
The students suffered some anxious moments earlier in the day when the CBSE website crashed for about an hour due to heavy traffic.
The results were declared at noon and were available at www.results.nic.in, www.cbseresults.nic.in and www.cbse.nic.in
Of the three sites, www.cbse.nic.in and www.results.nic.in crashed following the declaration of results.
The results show a drop in the number of cheating cases in Delhi, officials said.
According to the official data on the CBSE website, the national capital recorded just three cases of cheating this year compared to 13 in 2014 and 25 in 2013.
Bihar’s capital Patna reported 11 cases this year compared to seven last year.
Similarly, 10 cases were recorded in Dehradun, six in Ajmer, three in Guwahati, two in Panchkula and one in Bhubaneswar.
There were no cases of cheating in Chennai, Allahabad and Thiruvananthapuram.
The total number of cases of using unfair means this year is 36, compared to 41 in 2014 and 63 registered in 2013.