No spiking of marks in class X, XII: HRD ministry

The Centre has asked all States to end the practice of “spiking” the scores of the Class X and XII board examinations to ensure that the results are “true reflection” of the performance of the students from 2018.

In an official communication to all States, the Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry also sought them to make their moderation policy public by uploading the same on the websites of their respective school examination boards.

All secondary school examination boards should also disclose “the quantum of moderation” on a year-to-year basis and upload the same of their websites to maintain “transparency,” it added.

“Practice of awarding moderation marks should be done away with, except in the cases of ambiguity in the question papers, inter-set variation in difficulty level if multiple sets system exists in the board, and vagaries in the evaluation process based on the statistical analysis,” the Ministry said.

The “bunching of marks” and their spiking should be “completely” avoided, it said.

The States have also been suggested not to add the scores of students' extra-curricular activities in the main marks statement, sources said.  

“They have suggested to show performance of students in extra-curricular activities separately on the marks statement rather than adding them into their scholastic performance. This is to ensure that the weightage of extra-curricular activities should remain same across the boards,” sources added.

The Ministry's advisory to the States comes following recommendations of an inter-board committee, set up under the central Board of Secondary School (CBSE) chairman earlier this year to suggest measures to address the issue.

The Ministry has accepted the committee's recommendation that the practice of awarding grace marks to board examination students should continue.

“The States, however, has been suggested to disclose their policy for awarding the grace marks,” official sources said.

The States have been requested to respond to the Ministry's “advisory” by the end of this months, they added. 

The practice of awarding grace marks is different from the moderation of the board marks.

While the grace marks is awarded to a student in case he or she is short of few marks to pass in one or two subjects in the board examinations, moderation is done for all the students to bring parity in their scores in view of the subjectivity involved in the evaluation of papers, variation in difficulty levels due to more than one question sets and other conditions.

While the moderation of examination scores is a well accepted method in most of the countries to bring parity in the evaluation of students performance, the school examination boards in India use the moderation policy to inflate the scores to safeguard the interests of their students against any disadvantage.