CBSE Class XII students of Mahadevi Birla Girls’ Higher Secondary School are delighted with their results, declared on Friday. Picture by Pradip Sanyal

Commerce has scored over science and arts have bettered their base in the CBSE Class XII results for the state, declared on Friday.

The authorities of most CBSE schools in the city said commerce marks were as high as last year, with the overall performance in the stream way ahead of science.

Most teachers are blaming the decline in performance of science students to the introduction of the “high-order thinking skill” questions, which test the examinees’ analytical ability.

According to information available, the city’s top score in the humanities is up from around 93 per cent last year to more than 95 per cent this year.

Saheli Nath, from Salt Lake’s Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, has scored 95.2 per cent in arts.

“The humanities students of our school have performed unexpectedly well this time. The highest score is 95.2 per cent in arts. We are proud to have such high marks in a comparatively low-scoring stream,” said Anindita Chatterjee, the principal of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan.

“Our school topper is a boy from science. He has scored 95.4 per cent. But what’s more significant is that the top score in the humanities in our school is around three per cent more than last year. Ananya Saha’s score, 93.4 per cent, is the highest in the humanities in the past 10 years,” said Manjula Chakraborty, the press coordinator of BD Memorial Institution, on the city’s southern fringes.

Most CBSE teachers held the new question pattern in science responsible for the drop in marks.

“To ensure that students develop analytical skills, the CBSE this year introduced high-order thinking skill questions in all science subjects. But the results show that the system has not worked well,” said a mathematics teacher of a south Calcutta school.

Some schools that have followed the CBSE guidelines and trained the students in answering analytical questions have done well, though.

“As directed by the board, we had organised training sessions to help the students answer high-order thinking skill questions. That has borne fruit. Our students have scored well in all three streams,” said Malini Bhagat, the principal of Mahadevi Birla Girls’ Higher Secondary School.

However, Sandhya Rastogi, the assistant commissioner of Kendriya Vidyalaya Sanghathan, said the low score in science was an all-India phenomenon. “A quick analysis of results show that low scores in physics and mathematics had led to the decline in science marks,” she said.

“It is not that there are too many failures in mathematics and physics. But the results indicate that the overall performance has deteriorated,” she added.