Bhubaneswar: The pass percentage in the Annual Higher Secondary Examination (AHSE) this year has gone up by 3% compared to the previous year. Conducted by Council of Higher Secondary Examination (CHSE), the AHSE-2026 saw an overall pass percentage of 85.85% against last year’s 82.77%. Also, girls outperformed boys in all four streams — arts, science, commerce and vocational education. The results of all four streams were announced by school and mass education minister Nityananda Gond here on Wednesday. Stating that students in all streams performed better than last year, Gond said that no result was withheld this time. Close to 3.98 lakh students of the 4.01 lakh who registered for the examination this time, wrote the papers, at least 10,000 more than last year, the minister added. As many as 3,533 students remained absent during the examination. Among the four streams, students of science stream scored the highest pass percentage of 88.82%, followed by commerce (88.07%), arts (84.5%) and vocational education (77.62%). “Although the science stream saw the highest pass percentage, the students of vocational education marked a huge improvement from last year when 60.57% cleared the AHSE. The pass percentage improved by 17.05%,” the minister said. In science stream, the students of Balasore scored the highest pass percentage of 96.63%; in commerce and vocational education, Boudh and Nabarangpur districts scored a perfect 100% respectively; in arts, Sambalpur posted the highest pass rate of 89.48%. School and mass education department commissioner-cum-secretary N Thirumala Naik said that like the Class X examinations, special focus was given on academically weaker students with remedial classes for them. Mrunal Kanti Das, CHSE chairman, said the council’s revised question pattern, introduced in 2025, also contributed to the improved results. Under the new system, students write an 80-mark theory examination, while the remaining 20 marks are allotted for internal assessment, instead of the earlier 100-mark written examination. “If you compare this year’s results with last year’s, at least 4,000 more students have entered the 90% and above bracket. Around 2,000 students scored 90% and above in 2025, while the number has crossed 6,000 this year,” Das said. Prasanta Kumar Parida, CHSE controller of exams, said the students will be able to download the digital copies of their mark sheets from DigiLocker May 21 onwards, and their hard copies will be available at their respective institutions from June 15. The mark sheets can be downloaded by entering the roll number and registration number on the websites: results.odisha.gov.in and results.digilocker.gov.in Notification regarding re-evaluation will be out on May 27.
