Majority of the school boards to stop moderation of class XII board marks

Majority of the school examination boards on Monday agreed to do away with the system of moderation of the Class XII board marks of the students from the current academic session.

“A resolution to end the practice was also passed here at a meeting of all school boards,” one of the board officials who attended the meeting told DH. The school education department of the Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry had convened the meeting.

Moderation of board marks, which is done to bring parity in the scores of the students in view of the subjectivity involved in the evaluation of their papers, was a matter of concern as some of the students were getting as high as 100% marks in their board examinations due to the system.

The governing board of the central board of secondary education (CBSE) had last year recommended that the Ministry should persuade all the school boards to end the moderation of marks system as the school boards were competing with each other to give inflated marks to safeguard the interests of their students against any disadvantage.

“Almost all of us realised that this system was not appropriate and hence should be ended in the best interest of students. There was a common consensus at the meeting that moderation of board marks system should be put to an end from this year itself,” another school board official said.


Though the meeting resolved to do away with the moderation of board examination marks system, the system of giving grace marks to students, whose score is slightly below the minimum pass mark in a subject, will continue. For such cases, however, the Ministry proposed that mark-sheet of the students should reflect the grace marks given to them in order to declare in pass in a subject.

“Many of the states agreed to this proposal while some expressed their reservations. They felt that mentioning in a student’s certificate that he or she passed with a grace marks would not appropriate. It will be like stigma that such students will have to carry all through their life. We will go back and decide whether we should be doing it or not,” an official from Punjab said.

At the meeting, the Ministry also proposed for evaluating the students’ performance in academics and extracurricular activities separately as has been adopted by the CBSE in its revised framework for uniform assessment of the students of its schools.

“The Ministry advised for grading the students’ performance in extracurricular activities separately so that there is clarity on the students’ performance in academics and extracurricular activities. Most of the state school boards agreed to this at the meeting but the actual implementation will depend on the decision of the respective state governments,” an official said.

Majority of the School Boards also agreed to the Ministry’s proposal for adopting the Science and Mathematics textbooks of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) for classes IX to XII, he added.