Moderation Policy : The Game Changer

Moderation Policy : The Game Changer

Gone are the days when students competed to score good marks and get high ranks in exams but today the education boards in India compete to give more marks to their students.One might wonder how can this be possible....But it's happening everywhere!!All thanks to #Moderation_Policy.

Moderation policy was introduced in 1990's keeping in mind the difficulty level of the question paper that a student got compared to the question paper of different sets. Through this the students were given grace marks for difficult questions. Over the years this policy got diluted to such an extent that student started securing marks which did not match their capabilities and expectations.The consequence of this was that the cutoff percentages to get into many institutions for various courses became very high.State boards started to give more marks to their students so that they could get higher ranks in exams where the marks scored in class 12th were considered.

But how did all this come to limelight? Debarghya Das, an Indian student studying at Cornell university was asked by his friends if he could hack into the ICSE website and tell them their results even before they were officially announced.He did that(thanks to the poor security of ICSE website) and out of curiosity he mined the results of all the students who had appeared for the exams that year(around a lakh students).The results that he obtained were startling.Very less students had scored marks between 70-90 but the majority of the students belonged to 90-95 catogery. In fact some marks were not even obtained by even a single student( around 30 of them). This exposed the unscientific way the marks were given to students. He also found out that 3 consecutive marks were not even scored by a single student. Imagine,not even a single student scoring 3 consecutive marks!!!!!.
To bring some sense to the marking system the CBSE board issued a notification stating that the moderation policy would be scrapped. A lawyer and a parent filed a case against the scrapping of moderation policy at Delhi High Court. The HC quashed the decision taken by CBSE since it would be unfair to the students who had appeared for exams this year and implement it from next year.So even if this controversial policy is scrapped the doubt that lingers the minds of many students like me who are a part of CBSE is whether the other boards will follow the guidelines seriously or play their own game.

In my opinion the only solution to this jig-saw puzzle is to have a centralised exam with same question paper thus creating a level playing field for all the students and eliminating all the illegal practices that hamper the growth of talent and knowledge in our country.