Moderation of marks in CBSE Class 12 to go

Inflated marks appear set to go from this academic year with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) preparing to remove a clause in its marking system, or moderation policy, which spikes its Class 12 results.

The CBSE examination committee will meet later this week to consider doing away with the clause in the policy that the board adopts before declaring results of the school finals.

“We want to ensure true marks of students are reflected in the board exams and to maintain the pass parity, marks of students are moderated. This is unfair on those who work hard as moderation is not applicable if a student gets 95 marks or above,” a senior board official said.

The governing body meeting on June 29 will further take up the issue.

The clause allows the CBSE to maintain “a near parity of pass percentage of candidates in the current year vis-a-vis preceding years, subject-wise and overall”.

It because of this clause that the board results have shown near-parity in terms of pass percentage: 82% in 2015, 83.05% in 2016 and 82.02% in 2017.

The government is inclined to nix the policy, in view of students scoring 100% marks.

“Generous distribution of marks will stop soon. I will stop such bad practices in the field of education,” said Union human resource development minister Prakash Javadekar in Pune on Saturday evening.

“Students have to work hard to earn marks. It isn’t possible that everyone scores 100 out of 100 in all subjects. There should be some restrictions while awarding marks.”

Such high scores trigger abnormally high cut-offs — sometimes touching 100% — for subjects such as mathematics and history during admission to sought-after colleges, especially in Delhi University.