On Monday, CBSE along with 31 other education boards that come under Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations and National Institute of Open School have come to terms to scrap the ‘spiking’ of marks that leads to ‘marks moderation.’ This means that the marks of grade XII will come down which will lead to lower cut off marks for degree admissions in Universities.
On April 12, the HRD Ministry consulted all the states to be done with the grace marks awarding practice. CBSE, in December, approached the HRD in order to scrap marks moderation as it has led to the heightened margin of scores and in turn higher cut offs for colleges. In the meeting chaired by Anil Swarup, secretary of HRD, most of the educational boards were present and expressed their consent.
A member in the meeting said, “A consensus has been reached that education boards will no longer inflate marks. More realistic scores will be given this year to Class XII students.” An official said that these grace marks will be in use, but only to low scorers and those on borderline of passing.
In the marks moderation policy students are awarded, in certain subjects, up to 15% extra marks if the questions were found to be difficult.
In July 2016, the CBSE awarded as many as 16 extra marks in Mathematics paper as it was deemed difficult. Nine different subjects were also moderated and given 10% extra. The result was students with 78 percent had acquired 93 by the end of the marks moderation. This became a matter of concern in educational circles, which then decided to be done with the ‘Marks Moderation’ process.
