The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) will scrap a provision in its examination bye-laws which gives scope for unreasonable spiking of the scores of candidates—not the entire moderation policy adopted since 1992.
What will go is the Clause (e) under Rule 59 of the examination bye-laws that provides for moderation to maintain “a near parity” of pass percentage of the candidates in the current year vis-à-vis preceding years, subject-wise and overall.
“This is the provision that has been leading to spiking of marks for last several years. We will amend our bye-laws and scrap this provision. Other provisions under the moderation policy is fine as they ,” a CBSE official told DH.
However, the bye-laws have to be amended before November this year for ending the spiking of board marks from 2018 as filling of the forms by the students for the next board examinations will begin in almost all States from this month, he added.
Moderation of examinations scores is done by the institutions “all over the world” to bring uniformity in the evaluation process, the official said. When there are multi-sets of question papers and large number of examinees, moderation is required to deal with the possibility of examiners' subjectivity, compensate students for vagaries and level up the mean achievements in the set-wise performance of the candidates attributable to the difference in the difficulty level of different sets of question papers, he said.
“Upto this point, the policy is fine because there would hardly be increase of two or three marks in the scores when we level up the mean achievements in the set-wise performance of the candidates. But why should we have a provision to bring parity in the pass percentage of students of this year with those of previous years? This provision is irrational,” the official added.
Though the CBSE is determined to amend its moderation policy before the next board examinations, it requires other school boards also to come on the same page. “There was a common consensus on the issue in a meeting held on April 24. All the school boards agreed that there should be spiking of marks in the name of moderation. We just have to sit once again and give it a final shape with common consensus,” the CBSE official said.
All school boards in the said meeting decided to constitute an inter-board working group comprising the heads of the school board of Gujarat, Jammu and Kashmir, Kerala, Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Manipur and the Council for Indian School Certificate Examination (CISCE) with the CBSE chairman being its convener.
“The terms and conditions of the working group has to be finalised by the HRD Ministry. We have not yet received any communication so far (from the Ministry). The process will soon begin as the Ministry also wants to see the end of the spiking of board examinations marks from 2018,” the official said.
Published 13 June 2017, 14:50 IST