Bengaluru, The girls have outshone the boys in Karnataka's Secondary School Leaving Certificate (SSLC) examination (Class X) results in which an overall 71.80 per cent of the students cleared test, an official said on Monday.

The pass percentage among the boys stood at 66.41 per cent as compared to 77.74 per cent in girls. As many as 4,25,352 boys and 3,85,697 girls had appeared for the exam.

The overall pass percentage and the number of examinees declined in 2019-20, compared to the last academic year. The pass percentage was higher at 73.70 per cent last year.

Likewise, the number of candidates declined from 8,25,485 to 8,11,050 in a year's time.

Meanwhile, Minister for Medical Education and in-charge for Chikkaballapur, K. Sudhakar, expressed his happiness on the district emerging as the top district in the SSLC results.

"It is a matter of pride that the Chikkaballapur district has topped the entire state in the SSLC exam. As an MLA from Chikkaballapur, I am very happy," said Sudhakar.

Of the 8.2 lakh students, 7.3 lakh came from 5,233 government schools, 3,363 from aided schools and 6,103 from unaided schools.

Six students have secured the highest number of marks in the exam, 625, followed by 11 students scoring 624, 43 scoring 623 and 56 scoring 622.

The six top scorers are Sannidhi Mahabaleshware Hegde, K.S. Chirayu, Nikhilesh Marali, M.P. Dheeraj Reddy, A.L. Anusha and I.P. Thanmay.

All the six top scorers came from English medium schools. In fact, the first 17 students who scored highest marks came from English medium schools.

In Kannada medium, M. Abhishek, Sahana Shankar Kamagoudar and Shurti Basagouda Patil scored the highest marks of 623.

A total of 115 students took the SSLC exam in Hindi medium, 126 in Tamil, 207 in Telugu, 10,618 in Marathi and 21,022 in Urdu.

As expected, the highest number of students took the exam in Kannada medium, 4.2 lakh, while English came second with 2.7 lakh.

Under the category of private students, 59 students above the age of 50 years appeared for the exam, of which only two passed.

Initially, the exams were scheduled from March 27 to April 9, but were put off as the lockdown was extended thrice up to May 31.

Later, the exams were rescheduled between June 25 and July 4, under the shadow of coronavirus, compelling the authorities to take extra precautions.