NEW DELHI: She was almost on the verge of sinking into depression after her Class XII mathematics examination went horribly bad. But Isha Goyal of Amity International School, Pushp Vihar, was over the moon when the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) results were declared earlier this week. She had scored a neat 95 in mathematics. She wasn’t aware of the CBSE’s irony—the more difficult the paper, the higher marks the student gets, thanks to grace marks given at the teacher’s sole discretion, affecting admission equations.
Over 90 per cent of her classmates who had thought they wouldn’t do well considering the problematic exam also did well. According to CBSE sources, though no official data analysis has been done specific to subjects, average scores in mathematics have not really gone down, affecting the cut-off marks in colleges.
Actually, Isha Goyal of Amity International School needn’t have been surprised. A hue and cry had broken out across the states over the stringency of the paper immediately after the exam. The issue was raised in the Parliament where Parliamentary Affairs Minister M Venkaiah Naidu, assured MPs that action would be taken keeping the students’ concerns in mind. Following that, the CBSE decided to go in for a “soft marking” in mathematics.
CBSE sources said the board has separate committees to assess the difficulty level of any paper and then decide whether lenient marking was needed to accommodate the students.
“For example, this year after a hue and cry was raised over the difficult maths paper, a special committee analysed it and decided that it was lengthy. Thus, we decided to evolve guidelines for easy marking”.
Some of the guidelines given, included giving full marks, even if a student has attempted the first step of a four-part question. Grace marks have also been given for students who were not making it to the passing cut-off as well as marks were rounded-off in case of students who had scored high.
“Take for example, students who scored 92-93, their marks were rounded off to 95,” the sources said.
This is not the first time CBSE is resorting to liberal marking to address the concerns of students and teachers over difficulty of the paper.
CBSE sources said that it was the only board in the country, which issued guidelines every year on how to mark copies.
Teachers agreed that the high marks awarded by the board was leading to unneccessary high cut-off marks in the Delhi University colleges.
Says a teacher in a leading private school: “The objective system of setting the question paper and liberal marking are destroying the education system of the country”.
