Hold on for a moment and take a trip down the spine to May, 2017, when CBSE was all over the news channels, newspapers and social media for its ‘moderation policy’, recalling something? Or should we mention the tug of war that followed between the CBSE and the high court over the ‘spiking of marks’ that gave the students and their parents countless number of sleepless nights, remember?
In the wake of the same, CBSE along with as much as 17 State Education Boards has finally decided to do away with the marks ‘moderation’ policy. It is worth mentioning here that this attempt of taking the State Boards into consensus was the second one from the central HRD ministry. The ministry had also tried to implement the same to the last year’s academic session when the High Court intervened and reversed the order stating that the rules of the game can’t be changed at the eleventh hour.
According to trusted sources, the Secretary of School Education, Anil Swarup, had written a proposal to the heads of all State Boards requesting them to reject the unfair spiking of marks, popularly known as the so called moderation. The education boards of Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand, Manipur, Mizoram, Telangana and Goa have decided to agree with the proposed policy. ‘The above mentioned state boards will either do away with moderation completely or contemplate on the same in the light of the letter from the HRD ministry’, mentioned a source who didn’t wish to be revealed. However, it’s not a win win yet, because states such as Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Odisha are yet to reply to the proposal.
Moderation policy originally referred to the practice of providing students with grace marks in the subjects regarded ‘difficult’ or in the situations of absurdity when the question paper encompassed questions that were out of syllabus. The CBSE started this practice in 1992 and it’d been going on since then.
Suspicions arose when some state boards were accused of spiking marks irrationally, which led to a steep jump in the cutoffs of some prestigious universities in the country, some colleges even reporting 100% cutoffs in Delhi University. The accusations coaxed CBSE to ponder and the policy was proposed to be scrapped, but the High Court intervened and reversed the orders.
Anil Swarup’s fresh plea states that the moderation policy in the respective states can continue but the rules and regulations governing the same will have to be publicly declared and the weightage of extra curricular activities will have to be same throughout the country.
In the light of the new developments, students can finally hope that the Moderation policy will provide them with a levelled playing ground and will not be irrationally put to any misuse.
