CBSE toppers say grades don’t matter much later on
Central Board Secondary Education (CBSE) exam toppers, with each passing year, seem to be on a mission to score higher than the previous years’ achievers.
Hindustan Times tracked down a few previous toppers to find out how their lives have changed and what they are doing now.
Just like Raksha Gopal, who has topped the CBSE 12 boards this year, Sarthak Agarwal had topped with 99.6% in 2014. He is currently studying BA (Hons) in Economics from Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC) and has got through to Oxford University to do his MPhil in Economics.
Agarwal said though the grades helped him get into a good college, it did not matter too much later on. “In fact, sometimes it was a bane. Everybody knew I had topped CBSE so they expected me to do well in college too. Even if others did not pressure me, there always was some pressure from within to perform well,” he said.
Sukriti Gupta, who had topped the CBSE boards last year with 99.4%, is on her way to becoming a chemical engineer, and is studying at IIT Delhi.
“It makes no difference to my life that I topped. Yes, it helped me with my IIT-JEE mains, as the JEE rank used to be a cumulative of the (entrance test) score and board marks back then. It is not a very significant event for me as I must look forward and not be stuck on my past achievement,” she said.
Similarly, Nitin Jain, who scored 95% in his boards and secured the top rank in the IITJEE exams in 2009, studied at IIT Delhi and now works in Silicon Valley with Google.
“After Nitin topped IIT JEE, we felt we have overnight gained celebrity status. Wherever we would go, people would enquire if we were parents of Nitin. It looked good but sometimes it was bad as well as we lost privacy and some coaching institutes started misusing his name in advertisements,” said Kumkum Jain, his mother.
More than books, they remember the good times in school. “I wish I had played more sports,” said Agarwal.
WITH INPUTS FROM PRABHU RAZDAN