Examination Cancelled, Results next month

Title of this blog is from a headline on 2nd June, the day after CBSE was asked to cancel its 12th class examination. And I wonder if anyone felt that there was something strange about this headline. Result of what, if exams are cancelled.

No, I am not suggesting that CBSE should have waited indefinitely for situation to improve and then conducted the exams. That would be too stressful and we needed a closure on this batch. But suggesting that we should have an artificial method to guess how many marks a student would have got if the exam was conducted is something I find very strange.

But this is nothing new. Last year too, we had scores of some subjects been filled as average of other subjects. In many universities, marks of courses done in 3rd year were put as average of previous two years. Nobody thought that assigning marks in history on the basis of marks scored in Hindi was strange.

Was there an option. Of course, there was. CBSE could say on the 12th class marksheet that no public exam was conducted and the marks are as assigned by schools (with some regulations) and hence cannot be compared. So CBSE would have said that they had the confidence that if a school was declaring a student passed, they too could declare that the student had enough capabilities that they expected from someone passing a 12th class exam. What this would have meant is that CBSE was not commenting on the specific marks assigned by schools and was not recommending that marks assigned by one school be comparable with marks assigned by another school.

Would this have been acceptable to stakeholders, particularly those who till the month of May were shouting that our system is bad because it considered examinations as sacrosanct. No way. While exams are considered bad, marks are important. How would university admissions take place unless CBSE certifies that marks are comparable.

But shouldn't that be a problem of the university system. May be they would have still treated marks of different schools as equivalent just like they treat marks of different boards as equivalent today. Or may be this would have forced the universities to come up with a better system of admissions.

But the nice thing about the whole issue is that no one cares about lying (or certifying marks in one subject based on how student had performed in unrelated subjects two years ago), and no one cares about quality or merit. Universities need a metric, however bad it may be, but which can be used to rank all admission seekers in a serial order and which will not be quashed by the courts. The only value of 12th class marks is to satisfy courts that admissions were done without any favoritism.

Note that I am not at all suggesting that there should have been exams. I am not at all bothered that everyone seems to have passed with high marks. My only concern is that a Board is certifying those marks which are not based on any exam.