Delhi University Cut-Offs Likely To Dip As CBSE Decides Not To Inflate Board Results

CBSE chairman RK Chaturvedi has requested Delhi University Vice-Chancellor Yogesh Tyagi to consider giving appropriate weightage to students of the board because it is strictly following the policy of not moderating boards marks.

In a resolution adopted during the meeting of 32 school boards organized by the Central Board of Secondary Education and attended by School Education Secretary Anil Swarup, it was decided that they will not inflate class 12 results.

If the decision is implemented, it will negatively impact the marks scored by the students and overall board results.

However, CBSE chairman RK Chaturvedi is of the view that different state secondary boards may not put it into practice until next year as they are in the midst of result preparation for 2017 and as an outcome, students belonging to the board will be at a great disadvantage during admission process in the University of Delhi for the session 2017-18.

To guard them against the same, RK Chaturvedi wrote a letter to DU Vice-Chancellor Yogesh Tyagi to bring a change in DU's admission  process and give appropriate weightage to CBSE Students.

What is moderation?

Moderation is a process in which school education boards tweak the marks of class X and XII students to align the marking standards of different examiners, to maintain uniformity of pass percentage of across years and to compensate for the difficulty in solving different sets of question papers provided for the same subject.

The practice, though, started getting misused by the boards and prompted the best universities in the country to keep increasing their cut-offs to maintain the quality of education. It was due to this reason that DU rose its cut-off to 100 percent in 2015, which made headlines across the nation.

It remains to be seen whether Delhi University, which will start the process of online registration on May 22, will oblige to the requests made by CBSE chairman or not.

State boards like Punjab and Karnataka seem to have followed the resolution as The Punjab School Education Board (PSEB) Class 12 results saw a dip of 14 per cent in the overall pass percentage as compared to last year. Whereas, the Karnataka Board Class X results witnessed a drop of 7.24 per cent in the pass percentage.

Central Board of Secondary Education had requested (Ministry of Human Resource Development) MHRD in December last year to develop a consensus among different boards on completely removing the marks moderation policy which always led to inflation of marks in board exam results. This is return would restrict where up to 15 per cent extra marks are awarded to students for question papers deemed to be difficult.