CBSE 12th Result 2021: Schools Asked to 'Moderate' Marks, What it Means to You

This year, students will be given marks based on not only their individual performance but their marks will also be moderated as compared to other students. CBSE in its official document said that the school will have to internally moderate the marks to account for the school level variations “by using a reliable reference standard.”

Sanyam Bhardwaj, exam comptroller at CBSE explained, moderation for the current year means “to moderate the position of the student in the section of the class or school, whether above or lower in comparison to other students. The result committee will moderate the marks.”

He explained that the policy adopted by CBSE is different from the moderation policy followed usually. “There are two kinds of moderation, there is one that the board does, which is to remove the disparity or unequalness between the two question papers. That is different from what the board is saying on the moderation of the marks in this policy. This (moderation as per new policy) is basically looking into the performance of the students and seeing what marks are to be enhanced or decreased in different subjects.” He added, “this moderation is to place the student in a sequencing manner lower or above by increasing or reducing the marks.”

This is offered as a solution as scoring for board exams is left at the school level this year. For class 11 and 12 components schools will be giving marks. This had raised concerns over the lack of uniformity across schools as the difficulty level of question papers, mode, and strictness of evaluation among other parameters remain different across schools. Class 11 and 12 components constitute 70 per cent of the total marking scheme.

CBSE former head Ashok Ganguly also highlighted that in the data which is left with schools, there are chances of fudging marks. “Class 11 results and other exams like half-yearly and pre-boards. There are chances of fudging the marks… To arrest inflation of marks, CBSE must compare the marks with the mean of each subject in each school last year, followed by moderation,” he said.

How will schools moderate marks?

CBSE’s scoring formula states that based on the total marks obtained by a student, moderation should be carried out by the school in class 11 and class 12 marks. “Scaling up and down of class XI and class XII marks may have to be done in a fair and transparent manner by the Result Committee,” as per the new policy. For class 10, CBSE had conducted board two years back, thus there would not be any requirement of scaling by the schools.

This task will be assigned to the result committee. It is a panel consisting of five members with the principal of the school as the chairperson of the Result Committee with teachers from the school and the neighboring schools affiliated to CBSE. Their responsibility is to deliver fair results.

“The historical performance of the school, in terms of the best overall performance in the previous three years’ board examination, will be taken as the reference for moderating marks assessed by the school 2020-2021,” stated CBSE document and explained further that if in a specific school, the overall average of the students in 2017-2018 is 72 per cent, in 2018-2019 is 74 per cent and in 2019-20, it is 71 per cent, the school will use the subject wise averages of 2018-19 for moderation, “which are the highest for moderation.”

The selected year will be the reference year for the school. “For each subject, the school will have to follow a broad distribution of marks, which will be based on the performance of the specific year by that school in that subject,” said the policy document.

Plus-minus five

The subject-wise marks assessed by the school for 2020-2021 should be within a range of +\-5 marks obtained by the students in the school, in the subject, in the reference year, as per the document.

However, the overall average marks for the school assessed in 2020-2021, for all the subjects should not exceed the overall average marks obtained by the school by two marks in the specific reference year.

In case data for a school for only two years is available then the best performance out of the two years will be taken, and in case only one year then that will be taken.

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