Difficulty of Indian Education Boards

With the IITs now having a requirement that students should have scored in the top 20 percentile of their respective boards in order to qualify for admission, we have a chance to evaluate the relative difficulty of various Indian boards.

The IIT Delhi website has the cutoffs for each board. These cutoffs represent the “80th percentile scores” for each board, i.e. if you were to  rank all students who took that particular board exam, these are the marks scored by students 80% from bottom. If you have written any of these board exams and got more than the corresponding 80%ile score for your board, you are eligible to join IIT (provided you score sufficiently in the JEE-main and JEE-advanced, of course).

This plot shows the cutoffs (80th %ile score) for various boards:

Source: http://jee.iitd.ac.in/percentile2013.pdf
Source: http://jee.iitd.ac.in/percentile2013.pdf

Note that the four southern states are on top. These states are reputed to have high educational attainment. Could this be a consequence of easier board exams in these states? We don’t know.

Also, interestingly, these four states are followed by ISC and CBSE, before other state boards. Interestingly, the cutoff for ISC is higher than that for CBSE, which flies against conventional wisdom that CBSE is “easier” than ISC.

Also, if you look at the data, some states have more than one board, and the JEE council has used separate cutoffs for each of these boards. For purpose of my analysis I’ve arbitrarily chosen one board for each state – typically the one whose total is the “roundest” number.