CBSE is creating a level scoring field for students

Moderation encourages inflated scores and the culture of impossibly high cut-offs

The country’s biggest school board appears to be moving towards creating a level playing field and enhancing transparency. Backed by the ministry of human resource development, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has decided to do away with the policy of ‘moderation’ of results: It won’t award students extra marks in exams for difficult questions, said to be the reason behind inflated scores in Class 12 board exams — which lead to impossibly high cut-offs.

This is a departure from the past when the CBSE and state boards used to dole out between 10% and 15% extra marks in ‘difficult’ subjects such as mathematics and physics in the name of moderation. However, these extra marks were subject to a ceiling of 95%. This implied that the scores of students getting 80% to 85% were enhanced, but someone getting 95% or above did not benefit from this. Not just was this unfair to those who were scoring 95% on their own, it also drove a few Delhi University colleges to set up an unrealistic 100% as the first cut-off during admissions to undergraduate programmes. More than two crore students in India appear in Class 10 and around 1.5 crore in Class 12 exams conducted by more than 40 education boards.

Another move towards transparency is a mention on mark sheets of extra marks given to Class 12 students to help clear a paper. Critics say that the mention of “grace marks” may lead to a feeling of stigma among students, but its supporters argue awarding grace marks is unfair to others who clear tough exams on their own. In the past, a number of state boards were using these spikes to ensure that their pass percentage didn’t dip dramatically compared to other state boards. Although the actual impact on cut-offs may be visible only during college admissions, it is a good sign that the Board is dropping an opaque old-school method of evaluation that granted students ‘spikes’ in grades regardless of the individual efforts they had put in.