School Board Results: Moderation or Tampering

Last week, Debarghya Das shocked us by writing a blog on quora, Hacking into the Indian Education System. He revealed two things. One, at least one of the boards did not care for privacy of its students. Two, the marks awarded to the students were not as one would expect in a public exam. The dust had hardly settled (which just means that we were about to forget the story, not that there were any explanations from the board) when Prashant Bhattacharji wrote yet another blog, Exposing CBSE and ICSE: Statistical Insights into the True Lies on your Marksheets. This blog shows that similar things happen in CBSE as well.

When I read the two blogs, I said to myself, there must be some academic reason for the boards to change marks, to moderate the marks as they call it. The search on CBSE site leads me to the following moderation policy.:

MODERATION POLICY OF BOARD’S EXAMINATION

 

Prior to declaration of results of Senior School Certificate (Class XII) and Secondary School (Class X) the Board adopts the Moderation Policy in the following manner: 

 

1. To compensate the candidates for the difficulties experienced in solving the question in a specified time due to misinterpretation/ambiguity of questions anderrors, if any, leading to multiplicity of performance and causing constraints on consumption of time for other questions.
2. To compensate the vagaries and to bring uniformity in the evaluation process.
3. To bring parity on account of element of subjectivity involved in the evaluation process.
4. To level up the mean achievements in the set-wise performance of the candidates attributable to the difference in the difficulty level of different sets of question papers in the multiple sets scheme.
5. To maintain a near parity of pass percentage of the candidates in the current year vis-à-vis preceding years, subject-wise and overall.

 

The moderation policy is too vague and does not help us understand how the marks are actually changed. The two blogs, particularly the first one, has been covered extensively by media. A lot of questions have been raised which are very uncomfortable and indeed are leading to the public at large losing whatever little faith that had in the boards. This also happens to be the time when the government is asking the public to have faith in the boards, by including the performance in the boards for admission to engineering programs across the country.

Given the timing of these two blogs and the ongoing admission process, one would have hoped that the government would act swiftly and ask the boards to explain the moderation policy at the earliest. They would have explained their policies. We would have pointed flaws in those policies and would have requested them to change those policies in future, but at the end of the day, we would have been happy that the policies were only increasing the marks without any explanation (like fitting the marks on a curve), and the whole process was not completely random. As time passes by, the faith in boards keep reducing and the belief that the changes in the marks are for non-academic reasons keep increasing. Even if there is a good academic reason to do such moderation, it must be made public. We all know what lack of transparency could do even in IIT JEE in the past.

The two blogs strengthen the already strong case that consideration of board marks for engineering admissions was always a bad idea. And notice that CBSE is considered to be amongst the best managed boards in the country. One wonders if that reputation is well deserved, and if it is, then what would be happening in the other boards. But what is clear is that unless boards come clean on their academic processes, they can't be trusted to the extent of using their marksheets in the admission process for highly competitive colleges and universities.

There are other issues that the data is pointing to. There appears to be an extremely liberal policy on grace marks. Do the boards provide an outcome of a course. Do they say things like, "someone who passes an English test can write one page in English on a topic of current interest without too many grammar and spelling errors." Do their passing criteria meet those outcomes. Or are all boards trying to compete with each other in increasing the pass percentage (and making their political masters happy as a result of such a result).

I wouldn't want to use terms like fraud, tampering, lies, etc., for now. I hope the boards will explain all this soon and we will have a chance to discuss their policies as academicians.