Modern High School student Priyadarshini Banerjee, the all-India ISC topper. Picture by Bishwarup Dutta.

New Delhi/Calcutta, May 19: Tanmoy Pal isn’t unhappy at all with the 96.25 per cent he has got. But the student of Calcutta’s Vivekananda Mission School is specially thanking one subject for “boosting” his overall ISC percentage — the newly introduced environmental education.

He has scored a perfect 100 in the subject.

So has Anusha Suresh, of Calcutta’s Future Foundation School, who cleared ICSE with 96.80 per cent.

As the results came out this afternoon, students and teachers couldn’t stop speaking about the new subject that came as a “boon in disguise”.

“This year’s board results are better than ever before,” said G. Arathoon, additional secretary of the Council for Indian School Certificate Examinations, which conducts both the ICSE and ISC exams.

At a news conference in Delhi, Arathoon said the results have been improving every year but it was the introduction of environmental education that pushed marks several notches higher this year.

Overall, 97.96 per cent cleared the ICSE this year, an increase of 1.96 per cent over last time, while 96.96 per cent passed the ISC, which is 3.43 per cent more than 2006.

Arathoon said students from Bengal have “done the best”, though he didn’t give any figures.

There was another piece of good news for the state: the ISC topper is a girl from Calcutta, while a Cuttack boy has scored the highest in ICSE. Council members, however, said they couldn’t give out the names as a “matter of policy”.

But they were clearly pleased with the success rate, more so with the “value” added by the new subject, which was introduced after a Supreme Court directive aimed at raising awareness among students.

“Environment education is a subject that everyone can relate to because it is connected to our daily life,” Arathoon said. “Many schools kept it optional but we made it compulsory.”

The flip side is students will have to contend with higher cut-off marks to enter college. But neither teachers nor students were complaining after the results came out today.

“Initially, we thought the introduction of the new subject would be a burden,” said Proma Das, principal of Calcutta Public School, Kalikapur. “But it turned out to be a boon in disguise as the marks brought up the overall average percentage of students. There are many who have scored above 90 in the subject.”

Overall, girls have again fared better. While 97.51 per cent boys cleared ICSE, the percentage of girls who passed the Class X tests is 98.53. The pass percentage in ISC is 98.24 for girls and 95.95 for boys.