However, no students from Mumbai or Maharashtra made it to the top four ranks in the country.

Mumbai topper Akhilesh Narayan is a student of Nerul’s Delhi Public School, and scored 99%(Bachchan Kumar)

Be it the Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE) decision to skip school-based exams for Class 10, or the assessment of language subjects this year, but the overall pass percentage for the CBSE Class 10 results, released on Tuesday afternoon, saw a major dip. The all-India pass percentage stood at 86.7% this year, a 4% drop from 90.95% in 2017.

Mumbai has two toppers who scored 99% — Akhilesh Narayan, a student of Nerul’s Delhi Public School, and Rashi Shah from The Somaiya School in Vidyavihar. However, no students from Mumbai or Maharashtra made it to the top four ranks in the country this year either.

While school principals said the board had been generous with marks, many speculated that the reason behind the drop in pass percentage could be because after many years, students had to study the entire syllabus for the board exam this year. In 2010-11, CBSE made Class 10 board exams optional for students, who could therefore choose between attempting the exams conducted by the board and school-based exams. However, this year, the board scrapped school-based exams, and all students had to appear for the board’s exams.

“Until Class 9, these students need to study only a part of their syllabus for the finals, and this would continue in Class 10 too. But that changed with the board exam becoming mandatory, and this batch of students got just one year to adapt to the change. It may have affected the overall pass percentage,” said Suman Samarth from RN Podar School in Santacruz. She, however, said the performance of students at her school was better compared to last year, with 20% more students scoring above 90% this time round.

While Chennai region, which includes Maharashtra, has ranked second among the 10 regions in the country with a 97.37 pass percentage, the region’s overall performance dipped by more than 2% as the overall pass percentage was at 99.62% in 2017.

Once again, girls have done better than boys, with 88.67% girls clearing the exam compared to 85.32% boys.

As per the statement released by the board on Tuesday afternoon, around 1.31 lakh students scored above 90% in the exam this year, of whom 27,476 scored above 95%.