9th Class Science vs Arts Group Pass Rate Trends (Punjab 2025)

Board-by-board, 2025

Board	Science pass %	Arts / Humanities pass %	Difference
Rawalpindi	49.01	30.30	+18.71
Faisalabad	51.80	41.10	+10.70
Lahore	47.47	37.37	+10.10
Sargodha	47.17	42.39	+4.78
DG Khan	60.05	57.37	+2.68
Bahawalpur	43.31	41.24	+2.07
Gujranwala	46.24	52.81	−6.57

Which board you sit under matters more than which group you pick

Science pass rates alone ranged from 43.31% in Bahawalpur to 60.05% in DG Khan — a spread of 16.74 points. That spread is wider than the science–arts gap in six of the seven boards. A Science student in Bahawalpur faced worse odds than an Arts student in DG Khan by more than fourteen points.

So the stream you choose is a smaller variable than most result-day commentary assumes.

Why Gujranwala went the other way

Gujranwala entered 129,439 candidates in its General group against 70,864 in Science. The arts stream there was the majority choice, not the leftover one. A stream that holds two-thirds of a cohort carries the full ability range, and its pass rate lands near the board average.

Rawalpindi is the mirror image: 52,219 in Humanities against 199,176 in Science. Where arts is a minority stream, it tends to absorb students moved out of Science after weak middle-school performance — and the rate falls away from the board average. That is a composition effect, not a difficulty effect.

The private candidate channel

Two distinct things get confused in most result coverage. Private institutes are fee-paying schools. Private candidates register directly with the board without attending an institution at all.

The second group is where arts numbers collapse. In Rawalpindi, 76,691 private candidates appeared and 22,237 passed — 29.00%. In Lahore, 116,226 private candidates appeared and only 38,806 passed, a 33.39% rate. Males in the humanities group were the weakest subgroup in Rawalpindi at 20.19%, and in Lahore at 21.07%.

Private candidates cluster heavily in Arts. Where they make up a large share of arts entries, they pull the published stream figure down — and that figure then gets quoted as though it describes classroom students.

2025 figures do not forecast 2026

Two changes break the comparison.

The 2025 papers were marked against a 33% per-subject minimum. From the 2026 first annual examination the minimum is 40% in every paper. A candidate scoring 36% in one subject passed last year and does not this year. Because arts entries sit closer to that boundary in most boards, the same rule removes proportionally more of them — expect the gap to widen where it already exists, and to narrow the Gujranwala reversal. If you want to see where your own marks land, the letter grade each percentage converts into shows the boundaries.

The second change is enforcement. Punjab Education Minister Rana Sikandar Hayat said the 2025 figures reflected students’ real performance following the crackdown on organised cheating networks across Punjab boards, and that while the numbers looked disappointing they indicated a more transparent examination process. Both changes push the same direction.

Reading your own board’s number

Treat the group figure as a description of who sat the paper, not of how hard it was. Before drawing conclusions, check three things in your board’s gazette: how many candidates each stream actually entered, what share were private candidates, and how far each stream’s rate sits from the board’s overall figure. In DG Khan the humanities rate landed within 0.03 points of the board average. In Rawalpindi it landed 14.82 points below it. Same country, same syllabus, same week.

FAQ