HRD to ask state school boards to do away with grace marks

Moderation of marks is a common practice adopted to “bring uniformity in the evaluation process”. In other words, marks scored by students are tweaked to align with the marking standards of different examiners, to maintain parity of pass percentage of candidates across years and to compensate students for difficulties experienced in solving questions in specified time.

This practice, however, has been often blamed for inflation of results across school boards in the last few years. For instance, the number of students scoring 95 per cent and above in the Class XII examination conducted by CBSE rose 23 times in six years from 384 in 2008 to 8,971 in 2014. This trend has forced the country’s best universities to set the eligibility bar drastically high for applicants.

Last year, two colleges affiliated to Delhi University set the threshold at 100 per cent for admission to their BSc (Computer Science) course. Very recently, CBSE came under fire after it was revealed that the board had awarded as much as 16 marks extra to candidates for the Class XII math exam last year.

The meeting called by the HRD Ministry is its third attempt in less than two years to convince states to give up moderation of marks. As first reported by The Indian Express on October 24, 2016, former school education secretary S C Khuntia held a meeting with the heads of CBSE, CISCE and NCERT and asked them to explore the feasibility of indicating Class XII results in percentile score, amidst reports of liberal marking by school boards to give their students a competitive edge.