New Delhi, May 14 -- The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) on Wednesday declared the Class 12 board examination results for 2026, with the overall pass percentage dropping to 85.20% from 88.39% last year, even as nearly 76,000 more students appeared for the exams. A total of 1.77 million students appeared for the examinations this year, compared with 1.69 million in 2025. The pass percentage was the lowest in the post-pandemic period and the lowest overall since 2019, when it stood at 83.40%. The decline was reflected across regions, with some of the steepest falls recorded in northern and central India. Patna recorded the sharpest drop of 8.41 percentage points, falling from 82.86% in 2025 to 74.45% this year. Prayagraj saw a decline of 7.10 percentage points (from 79.53% to 72.43%), while Vijayawada - which had topped the country last year with 99.60% - dropped by 6.83 percentage points to 92.77%. Panchkula recorded a decline of 5.44 percentage points (from 91.17% to 85.73%), while even top-performing southern regions such as Thiruvananthapuram saw a drop of 3.70 percentage points from last year's 99.32% to 95.62%, this year. This year, Thiruvananthapuram topped the country with a pass percentage of 95.62%, followed by Chennai (93.84%) and Bengaluru (93.19%). Prayagraj recorded the lowest at 72.43%. The pass percentage in foreign schools also declined to 90.50% from 95.01% in 2025. In March, CBSE had cancelled Class 12 board examinations scheduled between March 16 and April 10 in seven West Asian countries, including Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, due to regional tensions arising from the US-Iran conflict and security concerns. To ensure timely declaration of results, CBSE adopted a hybrid assessment formula combining marks from examinations conducted between February 17 and 28 with internal school assessments and performance data submitted by schools. CBSE exam controller Sanyam Bhardwaj in a statement said the board decided to declare results of students from the West Asia region simultaneously with the rest of the country "ensuring fairness and consistency in accordance with CBSE policy". The decline in the pass percentage came in the first year of CBSE's Online Screen Marking (OSM) system for evaluation of Class 12 answer sheets. Under the system, answer scripts were scanned and uploaded to a digital portal where teachers assessed them online, entered marks digitally and annotated responses on screen, while totals were auto-calculated to minimise human error. CBSE said 98,66,622 answer books were evaluated through OSM. However, as per policy, no merit list is declared by the CBSE. CBSE officials did not respond to HT's queries on the reasons behind the decline in the pass percentage. A principal of a Delhi-based school, requesting anonymity, said the rollout of the OSM system could have affected the results. "CBSE conducted only limited pilot testing in six private Delhi schools for two days. Many teachers, particularly in government schools, were not sufficiently familiar with the technology. Ideally, OSM should have been implemented next year," she said. Jyoti Arora, principal of Delhi-based Mount Abu School, said the decline reflected "stricter competency-based evaluation and greater emphasis on conceptual understanding under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, rather than the marking system under OSM alone." Bhardwaj, however, said the adoption of OSM marked a "paradigm shift" in examination evaluation....