With cut-offs for admission in colleges and universities scaling new heights every year, the practice of ‘moderation’ of marks in Class XII examinations could become a debatable topic at the national-level meeting of school boards called by the HRD Ministry in October end.
Moderation of marks is a policy adopted by school education boards, which is at times seen as the reason behind steady increase in Class XII results. Showing the propensity to award higher academic grades, the number of students scoring 95 per cent and above in Class XII examinations conducted by CBSE rose 23 times in six years, from just 384 in 2008 to 8,971 in 2014.
This trend has forced the country’s top universities to set the eligibility criteria drastically high for applicants. This year, two colleges of Delhi University set the admission threshold at 100 per cent for the admission to the course of BSc (Computer Science).
In fact, every year around two crore students appear in Class X and 1.5 crore students in Class XII public examinations conducted by 42 education boards in India. The moderation of marks is a common practice adopted to “bring uniformity in the evaluation process”. This practice is among many other examination reforms that will be discussed at the meeting.
