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The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has cheated lakhs of students who appeared for the Class 12 board exams in 2018 by unfairly “moderating” their marks, a practice that Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar had assured would be abolished.
Thirteen months ago, on 24 April 2017, the CBSE and 31 other school boards from across the country had agreed to do away with the practice of unfairly bumping up or spiking students’ marks to show higher-scoring results.
However, hearing a petition that argued that some states had decided to implement the policy change only from 2018, the Delhi High Court had ordered the CBSE in May 2017 to go ahead with “moderation” of marks of students in 2017.
Therefore, as per CBSE’s own statements and the Central government’s assurances, 2018 would be the first year with the new policy of “no moderation”.
The CBSE’s move will also impact the college admission processes this year.
In 2017, Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar had slammed the board’s unfair marking system, referring to the CBSE’s policy of spiking up marks as “an illogical menace” that needed to be stopped. Javadekar had said,
An incredible number of people scoring the particular mark 95 in individual subjects had exposed the CBSE’s dirty secret of “marks moderation”.
A data-driven investigation by this reporter, aired on 6 June 2016, had brought this to light. Conclusive data analysis of CBSE results over the past decade showed that the board was inflating students’ marks unequally – that is, marks of different students were being raised by different amounts.
Take a look at the following graph of the Class 12 Mathematics results of CBSE 2018. The graphs shows the results of over 5 lakh students who appeared for the Mathematics exam this year.
On the graph, if you hover over the 60 mark, for instance, the number that pops up on your screen is the number of times students scored 60 in the CBSE Class 12 Maths exam this year.
Strike you as odd? Why is 95 awarded many more times than all other marks?
Dheeraj Sanghi, professor at IIT-Kanpur, explains:
But why the obsession with 95? In a discussion following the exposé on CNN-News18 in June 2016, former exam controller for the CBSE, Pavnesh Kumar, unwittingly admitted the board’s flawed system while attempting to defend it.
“Those in the know can tell you that this is because the limit for a moderated score has been fixed by the board as 95. Those who have 80, if you give them 15 moderation marks, they will get 95. Anybody with 85, give them 10 moderation marks, they go to 95. But a moderated score cannot go beyond 95.”
He argued, “It is unfair to say that those scoring 95 without moderation are losing out, because their scores are not being reduced. Only the marks of those below 95 are being raised."
But is it fair to put students scoring 95 on par with students scoring less? Especially when college admissions hinge on as little a difference as half a percent.
In the Accountancy paper too, out of over 3 lakh results analysed, the number 95 is awarded to more students than any other number from 60 to 100.
Results of 3,07,327 students who appeared for the Business Studies paper were also analysed by a data analyst who writes at The Learning Point.
Consider students A and B. Let us assume they have exams in two subjects which will determine their college admissions.
In subject 1, student A scores 95 and B gets 85. But B’s 85 is moderated to 95 while A’s mark stays at 95.
In subject 2, A scores 95 and B scores 96.
That, multiplied over several subjects and lakhs of students, is the extent of the unfairness of CBSE’s moderation policies.
The 95 spike was observed across 10 of the 12 most-studied subjects of the CBSE, every year from 2008 to 2016.
Interestingly, the CBSE did not seem to apply the same policies of moderation to ‘optional subjects’ such as Hindi Core, Physical Education and Home Science.
In 2017, the Union HRD Minister went on record saying that the process of “moderating” marks was “illogical and unacceptable”.
In April 2017, HRD Secretary Anil Swarup said that a consensus had been arrived at by “State and Central Education Boards” to do away with “spiking of marks through moderation”.
As The Quint had reported even then, the CBSE’s own official by-laws do not even mention any scope for such arbitrary spiking as part of its moderation policy.
The Quint has sought a detailed response from the CBSE and the Union HRD Ministry. This article will be updated if and when they reply.
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