Of the total 7,72,828 students registered with various colleges in the State, the number of students who actually appeared for the examination stood at 7,44,473. Of these, 19,736 secured distinction while 1,01,552 secured first class.

Sanket Omprakash Dusad from Deogiri College, Osmanpura from Aurangabad division bagged the first rank in the State in the vocational and non-vocational category. He scored 97.67 per cent followed closely by two students from Nagpur division at 97 per cent. They are Madhur Kandelwal and Saurabh Patwardhan.

Sanket has always been fascinated by computers and after his success now, he wants to set up a silicon chip manufacturing plant. Though he has ranked 23rd at the IIT JEE, he does not want to take to computer engineering as this will call for moving to Kanpur IIT and he has nointentions of moving far from his parents.

In the non-vocational category, the first rank in the science stream was bagged by Shilpa Govind Talankar from Nagpur at 96 per cent while for the arts and commerce, the toppers were Vaishali Patange and Gautam Tarkude respectively, both from the Pune division. Jyoti Agarwal from the Aurangabad division secured the first position in Minimum Capacity Vocational Category (MVC) totalling 87.50 per cent.

Shilpa Kudarikar from Latur division bagged the overall first position in the girls category by scoring 97.33 per cent. Vivek Kokne from Latur bagged the first position in the backward class category.

The Mumbai division ranked first in terms of the pass percentage which stood at 69.24 per cent. Last year also Mumbai's pass percentage was the highest at 60.93. Mumbai division was followed closely by Pune at 61.55 per cent while the poorest performance was from the Amravati division where the pass percentage stood at only 35.76 per cent.

Sexwise statistics showthat females with 61.32 per cent fared better than the males (46.41 pc). Here again, Mumbai performed better than other divisions. The science stream recorded the highest pass percentage at 71.67 per cent followed by commerce at 64.74 per cent, arts at 41.65 per cent and MCVC at 40.01 per cent.