Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE ) is all over the news for its marks moderation policy.

The policy has created a flurry all over social media and among students who are anxiously awaiting their board exam result. Board removed the Marks Moderation Policy this year in order to keep the percentage of students scoring more than 95 per cent marks in check. However, with most of the state boards retaining the grace marks policy at least for this year, it is reported that state board students would have an upper hand in under graduate admission this year.

One of the bulging questions which are plaguing students is:

What is Marks Moderation Policy?

Answer to this question is: it's basically a provision of providing grace marks to students who are falling short of a few marks from passing the board exam. The moderation policy also makes provision for giving grace marks to students for extra difficult questions in the question paper or for any question with errors.

To bring uniformity in results and to make up for the differences in the difficulty levels of different sets of question papers in the same subject, education boards across India adopted the policy.

Next question that comes to mind is: Why board wants to discontinue this practice?

If CBSE does not follow the policy for preparing the results the overall and individual percentage of marks scored by CBSE students will fall. This can put them at a disadvantage in comparison to state board students. Many State school education boards are already under fire for spiking marks/grades and if CBSE decides to implement the discontinuation of marks moderation policy it will result in unfair advantage to state board students.

While the idea was to maintain parity in the pass percentage across years, the practice has been misused to artificially inflate board marks.

At last if the policy gets scrapped it means that the CBSE results could witness a drop in student performance for the first time in many years. The numbers of 90 and 95 percenters are expected to fall.