Pune: Playing a favourite game or pursuing a favourite hobby helped the students to come out with flying colours in the Indian Certificate of School Education (ICSE) examination (Class X) held in March this year. The results which were declared on Monday showed that it was not just studying but even playing helped them achieve their targets. Many schools in the city achieved 100 per cent result this year too.
While usually, the stories of girls having outdone boys in the results make headlines, this year, the ICSE topper in the country is a Mumbai boy Swayam Das from St Mary’s ICSE School, Navi Mumbai who scored 99.4 per cent marks.
Amongst the top scorers in the city is Aniket Tendulkar of Wisdom World School who scored 98.8 per cent marks. He said that throughout the year, along with studies, he also gave equal attention to his favourite game basketball.
“I love playing basketball. Even during exams, I played it for around two-and-half-hours daily and I must say it helped me better with my studies. I wish to pursue engineering. I am preparing for IIT as well as other renowned engineering colleges like NITs, BITS, etc,” Tendulkar said.
Another city topper, Shaurya Semwal of The Bishop’s Co-Ed School, Kalyani Nagar, who is also preparing to get into IITs said, “My teachers and my parents never ever put any pressure on me to top the exam, and that helped me a lot. Also, I played a lot throughout the year, and also during the examination which helped me improve my focus.”
Tanirika Roy, one of the toppers at the girl’s section of St Mary’s School, Camp who scored 98.4 per cent marks said, “Physics is my favourite subject, and I wish to pursue higher studies in Physics at one of the premier institutes in the world.”
Sakshi Aswani, a single mother of Stuti Aswani another topper at St Mary’s School with 98 per cent marks said that it was the support from school that helped her do well.
Stuti has scored 100 per cent marks in four subjects, history-civics and geography, science, computer science and environmental science and wishes to get into IIT Bombay after Class XII.
Several schools across the city have this time achieved a 100 per cent passing percentage, with a huge number of students scoring 90 per cent and above.
All the three Bishop’s Schools scored 100 per cent result. Pawar Public School achieved 100 per cent result for the seventh year in a row and with maximum students scoring above 80 per cent.
Similarly, all the students of Wisdom World School passed with 45 out of 62 students scoring more than 90 per cent.
Hutchings High School that has been giving at least one of the country toppers for the past couple of years didn’t manage to do so this time but achieved 100 per cent pass percentage with 97.86 per cent of the students in distinction.
The students of St Mary’s, Camp too shone with distinction in the ICSE results in 2018.
Regionwise passing percentage
The ICSE examination was conducted in 61 written subjects of which 22 are Indian languages and 10 are foreign languages.
For ICSE, the Southern region had the best passing percentage with 99.69%, followed by Western region (99.67%), Eastern region (98.02%) and Northen region (97.91%). Abroad, ICSE achieved 100% result.
This year, the passing percentage was revised by the board from 35% for Class X to 33%, and the percentage for Class XII was cut down from 40% to 35%.
There were 977 candidates with learning disabilities, out of which 94 candidates got above 90%.
