Upset over scaling down of marks to reference year: CBSE XII high scorers

Upset over scaling down of marks to reference year: CBSE XII high scorers

Sandhya Nair & Hemali Chhapia TNN

Mumbai:31.07.2021  

CBSE on Friday announced Class XII results of close to 13 lakh students, much to the disappointment of high scorers who said their marks were scaled down. The all-India success rate was 99.37% and Maharashtra’s 99.41%. Despite their disappointment, there was an 81% jump in 95%-plus scorers to 70,004 students across the country from 38,686 last year, which itself was a 55% increase from 2019.

A labourer’s daughter, Ansuiya, a Humanities student of Vidya Gyan Bulandshahr, a free residential school by the Shiv Nadar Foundation for economically underprivileged meritorious students from rural Uttar Pradesh, emerged the topper with the perfect 100%. Ansuiya aspires to be an IAS officer.

The results of 65,184 students, including from around 1,050 new schools, are under process and will be declared by August 5. A number of schools in Mumbai, too, did not get their results on Friday. In all, 58 Kendriya Vidyalaya schools of Mumbai had a total of 4,234 candidates in Class XII—their success rate was 99.98%, up from the previous year’s 94.9%.

While girls did better than boys by 0.5%, transgender students had a 100% success rate this year compared with 66.7% last year and 83.3% in 2019.

Thiruvananthapuram region continued to top among the 16 regions in the country with 99.89%. Pune region carved out last year maintained its 10th position this year too. Till 2019, Maharashtra was in the Chennai region.

Principals told TOI about having to scale down marks of high scorers. “High scorers felt they could have done better in a written exam. Above-average students benefited the most with the marking system adopted by the board,” said one.

CBSE examination head Sanyam Bharadwaj told TOI, “I know a lot of heads of schools had to scale down their results to be in line with their best reference year. I also feel schools have done a lot of hard work. But our decision was appropriate and the performance of schools across India has improved.”

Schools were given a reference year— 2018, 2019 or 2020—to evaluate students. “We had an extremely bright student in the subject ‘entrepreneurship’. Last year, our reference year, there was no top scorer for entrepreneurship, so this year’s student lost marks,” said a principal.

Nikita Bajaj, principal of R N Podar School, said, “Scaling down the results to bring them on par with the reference year was tough for teachers as we had some exceptionally bright students. For instance, while our reference year was 2018, it was when we also shifted from elective English to core English. So, we felt students would have done better if we had our own reference year for that subject.” Her school had 207 candidates or 44% students with over 90%.

Across Ryan Group of Schools,144 students or 28% of the total strength across Mumbai and Navi Mumbai scored over 90%.

Some said it was the best solution considering the pandemic. “If continued performance of a child over three academic sessions is brought into the mainstream, students will give a more focused and improved performance instead of waiting for one exam,” said Madhu Singh, principal, Billabong High International School, Malad. In Mumbai, eight schools’ results were not declared, including four new ones. Schools awaiting results include Kendriya Vidyalaya in Powai, Somaiya School, New Bombay City School, Radcliffe School, Kharghar, and Datta Meghe World Academy.

(With inputs by B B Nayak)