One-fourth have to fail -- CBSE

One-fourth have to fail -- CBSE
SUNETRA CHOUDHURY

NEW DELHI, APRIL 1: If you have taken your CBSE exams this year and you get 90% in Maths, you have every reason to celebrate. But from next year, it won't be that easy. You could be evaluated on the basis of not only how you have done but on how others have done. In other words, if you get 90% but over three-quarters of all students -- 77% to be precise -- scored more than you, you would have failed the exam.

In this radical new proposal of ``relative grading'' which is expected to spark off yet another debate over the system of evaluation in schools, the CBSE has recommended that from 2002, it will assign grades in place of actual scores. And scores will be measured in relative, not absolute terms.

This is one of the proposals worked out after a meeting between CBSE and NCERT officials. Their argument: this system takes the difficulty level of the question papers into consideration. And it gives a more scientific and accurate picture of the student's performance.

So A1 in a subject means your score is in the top 4 per cent of the students in that subject and this will give you nine points. A2 means you are in the top 4-7% and so and so on. The three lowest grades of D1, D2 and E will be awarded to those who are in the bottom 23% of the pile. And these students will not get their certificates.

This system of relative percentiles is common in SAT and GRE exams for admission to US colleges and even prevalent in some courses in IITs here. Some academics argue that it's more suited when the playing field is more or less level. Not the CSBE system where there's a huge gap between private schools and badly run government schools. For, this will force poor students who don't do well to drop out of the system. At present, in Delhi itself, 75,000 out of 1.5 lakh government school children fail.

``If you're making it mandatory for 23 per cent of the students to fail, then the percentage of children failing in one subject or another is bound to increase. Take Sanskrit, the percentage of children failing in this subject is definitely not 23 per cent but this system will ensure that they do. And the worst sufferers will be government school children. They, anyway, are at a disadvantage,'' says V K Tripathi, a physics professor at IIT.

Another fear is that unlike the SATs and the GREs, the new CBSE proposal has no provision of mentioning the actual marks obtained. ``It will be difficult to challenge the evaluation process,'' says an academic.

But statistician Ved Prakash of NCERT says this is the only system which will allow comparison of grades of one subject with another, of performance over the years and even comparisons across the board. Also, this is a more accurate picture

CBSE controller of examinations Pavnesh Kumar said they were yet to finalise details about the grading model. However, the proposal suggests otherwise. ``The debates about grading having all been over, it is time to accept the concept without any reservation...as it will initially commence from the secondary level, the universities will get a clear two year time for preparation.''