Board exams marks .. are they really comparable across various boards ??

      This is a question haunting me from a long time , since 2006 JEE cut-off (60% in 12th) decision, we all have been hearing that UP,Bihar state boards are tough to crack while CBSE/ICSE boards are piece of cake .This issue came to limelight after Sibbal's comment for increasing JEE cut-off to 80-85% in 12th standard ( he later took U turn on the issue).

      This issue was also recently  debated in Maharashtra for deciding admission criteria for Junior college admissions of non-Maharastra state board students.(Read ICSE-CBSE students) who generally gets quite better percentage marks and hence occupy top seats in Junior colleges (especially in Mumbai ) .
(Please click on the image to magnify.)



     Recently I came across this advertisement in newspaper , comparing top 1% marks across various boards ; you can observe top 1% in 12th for for ICSE in 2007(year when I passed out of 12th ) was at 92.6 % , for Maharashtra 80.2% , for UP board 73.2% and for Bihar Board it was 63.3 % .So it loosely translates to in year 2007 for 12th standard 92 % in ICSE were equivalent to 80% in Maharashtra , 73% in UP state board and 63 % in Bihar board !!!

     Take this with a pinch of salt as number of student appearing for state boards is usually quite higher then ICSE so these values are likely to have downward bias but even then across state boards the variation is really eye-opening.This statistics clearly underlines the need of having unifying board in India if we wish to continue with absolute comparison , as of now we can surely say that the absolute comparison of percentage marks across various boards is just not fair to all.


PS -- For those who are curious this table was taken from Inspire Scholarship advt.