Delhi varsity cutoffs likely to remain high

University cutoffs are likely to continue with its upward trend with Delhi high court asking the Central Board of Secondary Education to follow the ‘moderation policy’ for now.

Continuing with the moderation, the CBSE will award students extra marks in exams for difficult questions, said to be the reason behind inflated scores in the Class 12 board exams. This in turn lead to impossibly high cut-offs. There was speculation that with no moderation, the exam scores will go down and it may lead to colleges offering lower cutoffs than last year.

Almost 80% of applications at DU are from CBSE and the rest are from other boards, university officials said.

“The cutoffs are likely to continue with the earlier trend of going up by 0.25-1 percentage points than previous years as the CBSE will continue with moderation and that may result in students getting high scores as usual. But we will know for sure only after the results are out,” university sources said.

The cutoffs keep increasing every year as the number of students clearing Class XII go up and so does the number of aspirants.

As per CBSE, in 2015- 2016, there were 10,67,900 students in Class XII and in 2016-2017 there were 10,98,891. “The number of students clearing Class XII is increasing and so is the number of applications. But the number of seats has remained almost same for years. Only this year there has been addition of 2,000 seats,” the official said.

DU has had 54,000 seats at the undergraduate level for many years. The number increased to 56,000. The number of high-scorers is also going up. Last year, nearly 90,000 candidates scored 90% and above — 30,000 more than the previous year when over 60,000 students fell in that bracket.