Delhi High Court orders CBSE to continue with moderation of board marks policy

Delhi High Court has directed the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to continue with its moderation of marks policy for Class X and Class XII board examinations for this year.

A bench of acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice Pratibha M Singh passed an interim order here on Wednesday, directing the board to continue with the policy which was in place when the examination forms were submitted by the students last year.

“Rules cannot be changed after the game has begun. These children, who have worked so hard and have burnt the midnight oil, are entitled to some stability and the only stability they know is the system. Do not instill insecurity in them. Don't do it (withdrawal of the policy) this year," the Division Bench of the Court said.

The court was hearing a public interest litigation (PIL) filed against the CBSE's decision by a parent Rakesh Kumar and an advocate Ashish Verma. This comes at a time when the CBSE was gearing up to declare the results of board examinations later this month.

Under the policy for moderation of marks, the CBSE inflates the scores of the students by few percent in subjects in which students had difficulty in answering questions. The moderation of marks is generally done for the science subjects including Mathematics.

“It is done when one of the sets of question papers in certain subjects was found as to be tougher than the other sets of the questions. Moderation of marks is basically done to give students a level playing field so that students from other boards do not get advantage over those of the CBSE. It is done to help weaker students. Marks of the students who secure more than 95 percent marks in the board examinations are not increased through moderation,” a source in the CBSE explained.

The CBSE recently decided to end the moderation of Class XII board marks policy from this year after most of the school examination boards also agreed to end the system following a proposal of the Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry at a meeting here on April 24.

Hearing the PIL, the Court said described the CBSE's decision to scarp moderation policy as "wonderful," observing that it was an attempt to bring uniformity in the evaluation process to address the issue of "spiking" of marks.,

It, however, noted that scrapping of moderation of marks policy should have been done “prospectively and uniformly for everyone across the country."

The Court expressed its “deep concern” over the timing of decision to scrap the policy, saying the students who took the examinations "ought to have been put to notice" as they have the "right to know" what the CBSE was doing.

The court said that another "distressing" factor was that the CBSE, while decided to withdraw the moderation policy, "completely ignored" the fact that conditional admission had been offered to the Indian students by many of the foreign universities on the basis of the evaluation policy in place.

Students who would have got such offers would have taken loans and made payments and if the policy is withdrawn, it would cause "grave and irreparable financial loss" to the children,” it also noted.

“It cannot be denied that a change in policy can have drastic consequences. Grave and irreparable financial loss may also enure to the students," the bench said and added that it may also "completely change the course of academic future of students, especially those of Delhi."

It would be “a tragedy" if the CBSE students lose out on seats in foreign varsities to children from other countries because of the change in policy. "Don't trouble the children who have given the exams," the court held.

Counsel of one of the petitioners told the court that already some states had declared the examination results for Class 10 and 12 and they had given the students the benefit of the moderation policy.

Students of such states would stand a better chance of getting the 10,000 seats in the Delhi University as compared to students of the national capital, he added.