New Delhi, April 16 -- The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) on Tuesday declared the Class 10 board results for 2026, recording a marginal improvement of 0.04 percentage points in overall performance, with 93.70% students passing this year compared to 93.66% in 2025. This year, 2.47 million students appeared for the examination out of 2.48 million registered candidates - a participation rate of 99.53%, compared to 2.3 million appearing out of 2,385,079 registered candidates (99.45%) in 2025. In absolute terms, 2,316,008 students passed in 2026, higher than 2,221,636 last year, reflecting a rise in both participation and the number of successful candidates. "This year, the pass percentage of students in Class 10 is 93.70%, which is better than the pass percentage of last year i.e. 93.66% of the 2025 examination. This confirms that students are well prepared for competency based assessment," Dr Sanyam Bhardwaj, CBSE exam controller said in a press statement. Girls continued to outperform boys, though the gap remained similar to last year. This year, the pass percentage for girls stood at 94.99% (95.00% in 2025), while boys recorded 92.69% (92.63% in 2025). The performance of transgender candidates, however, dropped to 87.50% in 2025 compared to 95% of last year. Among the 22 regions of CBSE, Trivandrum and Vijayawada topped with 99.79% passing rate, followed by Chennai (99.58%) and Bengaluru (98.91%). In Delhi, the overall pass percentage stood at 97.38%. The number of high scorers saw 221,574 students (8.96%) scoring above 90%, and 55,368 students (2.24%) crossing 95% marks. However, students placed in the compartment category rose marginally in absolute terms to 147,172 in 2026, compared to 141,353 in 2025, though the proportion remained nearly unchanged at 5.95% (5.96% in 2025)....