Girls celebrate after the results for class 12 board exams are declared at The Convent of Jesus and Mary School in New Delhi yesterday. Girls have once again outperformed boys in the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) Class 12 board exams.

New Delhi: It was girl power in the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) class 12 as they outperformed boys across the country. Two girls also topped commerce and science streams in the country.

The overall pass percentage for girls was 85.94 while for boys it was 77.40 percent, said Rama Sharma, the CBSE spokesperson.

“The overall pass percentage recorded a marginal increase of 0.09 percent from last year. The pass percentage this year was 81 percent,” Sharma said.

According to CBSE officials, Tanvi Aggarwal, a student of Apeejay school of Faridabad, has topped the country in commerce stream with an aggregate percentage of 98.4.

“Tanvi has scored a perfect 100 in three subjects - economics, accountancy and mathematics. In business studies she scored 99, while in English she got 93,” a CBSE official said.

The other girl topper, Mrittika Sen, a student of Raj Hans Vidyalaya of Mumbai, also scored 98.4 percent to top the science stream.

Sen scored 100 in mathematics, 98 in English, 96 in biology and 99 in physics and chemistry.

As many as 15,839 students - double of last year - scored above 90 percent in the exams. As many as 8,059 girls and 7,780 boys scored 90 percent or above and 1,020 scored 95 percent or above.

According to the CBSE officials, 11 of those students who scored above 90 suffer from some kind of disability.

Subhasish Bhadra, a student of Delhi Public School, R.K. Puram topped in the national capital with 98 percent marks. Bhadra said that he used to put in seven to eight hours of study every day.

“Now I want to pursue economics in one of the top league colleges like St. Stephens and then do an MBA,” the 17-year-old told IANS by phone from Kolkata.

CBSE declared class 12 exam results for Delhi, Guwahati and Allahabad regions Friday. In Ajmer, Chennai and Panchkula regions, the results were declared Wednesday. The results were uploaded on the board’s website www.cbse.nic.in at 10 a.m. The overall pass percentage was the highest in the Chennai region - 92.06 percent.

The pass percentage of the other regions were - Ajmer (86.93), Delhi (84.25), Panchkula (81.20), Allahabad (74.56) and Guwahati (64.01).

CBSE students of the Gulf region performed better than their Indian counterparts. As compared to the overall pass percentage of 81 here, the pass percentage of the students in Gulf countries was 93.23.

In the Gulf too the girls performed better than boys. While the pass percentage of girls was 96.30, that of boys was 89.86. The students from countries like United Arab Emirates, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain appeared for the exams in 63 centres in March.

The autonomous Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas performed better than other schools across India with a record pass percentage of 94.09.

A total of 627,821 students - 361,642 boys and 266,179 girls - appeared for the CBSE class 12 exams in India and abroad this year.