The Central Board of Secondary Education chairman, R K Chaturvedi, has asked Delhi University Vice-Chancellor Yogesh Tyagi to award “appropriate weightage” to CBSE students for admission to undergraduate programmes this year so that they do not lose out to candidates from other state boards that inflate their Class XII results.
This was a resolution adopted by 32 schools boards in a meeting organised by CBSE and attended by School Education Secretary Anil Swarup on April 24. So, for the first time in several years, the board results are expected to register a drop in marks scored.
Guarding CBSE students against any disadvantage that could be caused by some of the state boards that do not honour their commitment, Chaturvedi, in a letter to Tyagi dated May 9, requested him to tweak DU’s admission policy to introduce some concession for CBSE students this year.
“CBSE, being a national board, intends to adopt the consensus developed in the (April 24) meeting to do away with moderation of marks in senior secondary examination from the current year examination i.e. 2017 itself so as to set the trend for other state secondary examination to adopt it on priority,” says Chaturvedi in the letter.
“However, different state secondary boards may do away with moderation for the next year as they are in the midst of result preparation during the current year. Therefore, this would place CBSE students at a disadvantage during admission process in the University of Delhi for the session 2017-18,” he says.
“In view of the above, I would request University of Delhi to consider awarding appropriate weightage to the students of CBSE applying for admission in Delhi University during the academic year 2017-18 to promote awarding of factual marks by other state secondary boards and do away with unfair practice of upward inflation of marks,” he says.
‘Moderation’ is a common practice adopted by most school education boards to bring uniformity in the evaluation process. In other words, marks scored by students in Class X and XII are tweaked to align the marking standards of different examiners, to maintain parity of pass percentage of candidates across years, to compensate students for difficulties experienced in solving a question in specified time and also for the difference in the difficulty level of different sets of question papers provided for the same subject.
However, the practice has been misused to artificially spike board marks, which in turn forced the country’s best universities to set a very high eligibility bar for applicants. 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. For the last few years, DU has witnessed 100 per cent cut-off in many subjects during admission season.
It’s not clear if Tyagi has agreed to CBSE’s request as the university is set to kick off its admission process on May 22. Tyagi did not respond to calls and SMSes from The Indian Express. Chaturvedi was also not available for comment.
While the CBSE board results are still a week away, a few state boards have already discontinued moderation, which has resulted in a drop in results. The Punjab School Education Board (PSEB) Class 12 results, declared on Saturday, saw a dip of 14 per cent in the overall pass percentage as compared to last year. The Karnataka Board Class X results witnessed a drop of 7.24 per cent in the pass percentage.
