One of the criticisms of the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings is that the rating and ranking league tables are entirely based on perception of respondents – albeit informed — of the survey. Factual data is conspicuous by its absence in these annual surveys, is a common complaint. While this lament is understandable, it’s self-evidently impossible to send inspection teams to every school to verify and/or supplement perceptions.
However this year thanks to Prashant Bhattacharji, a Hyderabad-based software engineer and data analyst who has pieced disparate bits of published data relating to the ISC (class XII) examination performance of schools affiliated with the Delhi-based Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE), we are able to present several league tables indicating the actual performance of Top 100 schools in the ISC examination held countrywide in February this year.
“Publication of league tables ranking schools according to the performance of their students in school-leaving examinations is standard practice in developed countries, especially the US and UK. CISCE, CBSE and all other examination boards have this information and data which they should voluntarily publish to enable education ministries at the Centre and in the states to identify under-served regions and cities/ towns for remedial purposes. Moreover such data-based infor-mation would be of great interest to parent communities country-wide,” says Bhattacharji, an alum of IIT-Kharagpur who began his career as a financial data analyst at Lehman Brothers, India, and worked with Microsoft Corporation, USA as a software engineer for three years prior to returning to India in 2010. Currently a data scientist with hackersrank.com, Hyderabad, Bhattacharji who has “deep interest in Indian education” has also promoted www.thelearningpoint.net, an independent education portal.
To view the Top 100 visit http://www.thelearningpoint.net/home/examination-results-2013/top-icse-and-isc-schools-based-on-academic-performance