In recent years, state-owned commercial banks (SCBs) in Bangladesh have shown relatively low financial performance than most of the private commercial banks (PCBs) in the country. While several issues may have contributed to such low performance by SCBs, this study aims to explore whether and how (if any) compliance with Corporate Governance issued from Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission (BSEC) varies between SCBs and high-performing private commercial banks (HPCBs), and whether this variation of compliance causes performance differences. Annual reports of five SCBs and five HPCBs in 2015 have been used and experts have been consulted for data collection. Partial compliance (PC) method has been adopted to find out the compliance with corporate governance guidelines by SCBs and HPCBs. From the BSEC notification, we set up 94 variables out of which 7 main variables are extracted using STATA. Then a cross tabulation and a descriptive statistics are conducted by using SPSS and STATA to explore the selected banks' compliance. The study shows that the compliance rate of corporate governance by SCBs is 35% to 97% while HPCBs' compliance rate is 90% to 98%. Under PC approach, the Overall Compliance Index of SCBs is 80% while HPCBs has an index of 95%. The study shows that SCBs' rate of corporate governance compliance is weaker than HPCBs in most criteria set by BSEC and not satisfactory which might have caused low financial performance by SCBs. The findings of the study has practical and policy related implications to improve the performance of SCBs in Bangladesh.