The CBSE Class XII results are anticipated with bated breath by more than 10 lac students every year. They are the gateway to college entrances and government jobs around the country. Given their importance, however, it is surprising that anyone has the ability to view them. If you wish to check the results of an individual, all you need to do is key in his or her roll number at the CBSE results archive.





That is exactly what we did. We got a computer to randomly try out 67,000 thousand roll numbers, and downloaded the corresponding results - making sure that we sampled from all regions in India. We then analyzed the data to learn more about education in India. This is what we found.





Caste and religion still matter - big time

Many Indians seem to believe that caste and religion do not matter in modern India. The numbers, however, seem to show otherwise. Those in the so-called "upper" castes seem to do much better than average. At the same time, it is clear that Muslims lag far behind the rest of the country.







Don't want to take our figures at face value? Check out results aggregated by surname below. Enter a surname, and see the results that you get. (You will only get a result if atleast 30 surnames exist in our database)

Clearly, we can see that Muslim, North-Eastern, and 'backward' Hindu surnames like Khan, Gurung and Yadav tend to perform much worse than upper-caste Hindu surnames like Arora, Acharya and Goel.

What do we make of this? The data helps back claims that the reservation system in India is an injustice to merit, but it also shows that certain communities might be under-represented in universities if admission was based purely on merit.