In order to bring down the cutoffs during undergraduate admissions, 32 education boards, have agreed to bring down the practice of awarding grace marks to students in Class XII Board exams.
According to the reports published in the Times of India, on April 24,32 education boards, including CBSE, Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations and National Institute of Open School, agreed to scrap spiking of marks through “moderation”.
Scrapping the grace mark procedure will likely bring down the marks in class XII board exams, and consequently cutoffs during undergraduate admissions.
On April 12, a meet chaired by Anil Swarup, Secretary in the Human Resource and Development (HRD) ministry decided to consult states on bringing down the practice of awarding grace marks in Class XII Board.
Education secretaries of various states and chairpersons of different boards were present in the meeting.
However, grace marks will continue to be given to low scorers on the pass-fail borderline.
At present, under the moderation policy, examinees are awarded up to 15% extra marks in
Earlier, in December 2016, CBSE resolved to seek the ministry’s help to get all state boards to develop a consensus on ending the marks moderation policy, which leads to inflation of scores.
In July 2016, TOI had highlighted how CBSE gave as many as 16 extra marks in the Class XII maths exam this year in the all-India set of papers and 15 marks in the Delhi set during the process of standardization. In nine subjects, marks were ‘standardized’ by CBSE up by more than 10%. As a result of the standardization, a student with 77 marks in mathematics may have ended up getting 93 marks on the result sheet.
