Over time marks moderation has degenerated into marks inflation

Over time marks moderation has degenerated into marks inflation

The policy of marks moderation must go. It does students no favour, leads to artificially high cut-offs for college admissions, and misleads students as to their ability, aptitude and capacity, leading to poor higher education choices. And the current kerfuffle over what scrapping moderation would do to the college admission prospects of students of boards that dispense with moderation is completely misplaced.
The marks moderation policy, implemented by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) in 1992 and subsequently by other school boards, aimed at bringing uniformity in results, balancing out difference in difficulty levels in different sets of tests in the same subject and variation in marking standards of examiners. Over time, the system degenerated into marks inflation.
There is no denying the variations in levels of difficulty of course work and tests and evaluation methods across school boards. But artificially inflating scores is not the solution. A two-step solution provides a better way. First, the adoption of a minimum common curriculum, school boards are welcome to go beyond. School boards have agreed to this. Second, adopting asystem of the normalisation of marks, mapping scores to percentiles for different boards. This is the system used in other countries with multiple school assessment systems.
To delay getting rid of moderation on the grounds that students should have been informed before the board exams makes no sense. How the examination is graded should not have a bearing on how students prepare. The decision of the Delhi High Court to ask CBSE to reinstate the moderation policy reflects not judicial clarity but trespass into a technical area outside the competence of the law. Fairness in admissions depends on normalisation of marks, not moderation.