CBSE’s horror story

Hundreds, possibly thousands, of families in Delhi go into deep mourning at this time every year. It is almost like a death in the family. The whole household treads on eggshells for fear of upsetting the grieving victim who goes into isolation, weeping inconsolably. Relatives and friends are sternly warned to avoid the query, ‘‘So what were your marks in the boards?’’

All exams throw up a few sore losers, but the Central Board of Secondary Education has an inordinately high percentage of those who feel cheated. As a parent I have for years been hearing horror stories about board goof-ups. There was a foreign secretary’s son who got, if my memory serves me right, 39 in Maths; it was reversed to 93 within an hour when his mother, a member of the CBSE board, raised a hue and cry. This year a colleague found that her daughter had been marked absent for a Political Science paper which she had appeared for. The mistake was rectified the same day. But the less well connected have to wait for weeks, often well after the college admissions are over, to find out if there was a totaling error of any sort. Every year less than two per cent of some 25,000 applications for re-totaling of marks get any relief.

The problem is not so much clerical errors as careless assessment of transcripts. But the board steadfastly refuses to re-evaluate an answer paper or even to physically produce a marksheet to clear up apprehensions about interchanging of marks. Unfortunately, the courts have upheld the CBSE’s stand, thus shutting out all accountability and transparency in this lop-sided examination system.

This year a young girl from Bal Bharati Air Force school who had been consistently scoring between 85 and 90 per cent throughout her school career, including her 10th board examination, obtained only 68 per cent in the 12th board. There is no way this obvious error can be rectified. Last year, 13 children who passed the highly competitive entrance examination to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) were denied admission since they got less than 60 per cent in the CBSE board, a percentage which even very mediocre students easily achieve. Five years ago, a girl who had won national awards for her writing skills, failed to reach the minimum qualifying mark in English in the CBSE for her to get admission in a BA Honours course in English. (Incidentally I notice that over a dozen Delhi colleges are conducting their own tests in English this year for admission, suggesting they too are disillusioned with the CBSE’s marking methods!)

An education ministry official, perturbed by his son’s poor marks in Political Science requested someone in the board to check out informally what had gone wrong. It turned out that the examiner had simply given one mark for each two-marks question even though the boy had made all the necessary points.

When I met the chairman of the CBSE, Ashok Ganguly, he candidly admitted that evaluations in the CBSE have a variation range of five to seven per cent, since the board has to handle huge numbers. In the 12th board, for instance, there are around 40 lakh transcripts and 10,500 evaluators.
The Delhi region, which accounts for more than one third of the nearly three lakh children who sit for the 12th board, Ganguly noted ruefully, has by far the largest number of complaints. He attributed this to the high expectations of the parents and the mad craze for marks in the Capital. ‘‘Heavens won’t fall if a child does not get into college rated A as against one rated B. All colleges should be equal’’, is his view.

In fact this attempt to ‘equalise’ education has brought the CBSE to its present sorry pass. Formerly, Delhi had two separate school leaving exams, the Delhi board for pupils from the Delhi government schools and the CBSE for the private and public schools. At the risk of sounding elitist, the merger has harmed both educational streams. The children from the Delhi government schools are unable to cope with the high standard of the CBSE and are demoralised by the high failure rate. On the other hand, 70 per cent of the evaluators in the Delhi CBSE board are from government schools, partly because private school teachers shirk the responsibility of board correction. The government school teachers have a different style of assessment and terms of reference from the private schools.

The meagre payment of Rs 6.50 per transcript is scant incentive to be a CBSE evaluator. And it is unpardonable that only around 12 per cent of the modest Rs 300 examination fee per student is spent on the actual correction work. A suggestion that perhaps the examination fee could be enhanced to ensure quality assessment was brushed aside as unthinkable by Ganguly, though my experience is that the poor seldom grudge money spent on education. In any case the CBSE could always introduce separate charges for government and private schools.

If I write with some degree of indignation about the CBSE it is partly because of my own personal experience. Some years ago I met the former chairman of the CBSE B.P. Khandelwal in the context of a re-check for my younger daughter’s CBSE marks. I did not identify myself as a journalist for fear it would harm the case. Khandelwal’s advice was that one must adopt a philosophical attitude towards mark assessments. He pointed out that even the great poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan, Amitabh Bachchan’s father, was not awarded a first class in English by Allahabad University in his MA. Which is cold comfort to children who are vying for college admissions in a competitive environment where some kids are known to scores as high as 98 in English.

Khandelwal threw the carrot that I could in strictest confidence possibly be shown the marksheets to set my doubts at rest. But nothing of the kind ever happened. After numerous telephonic reminders over a fortnight I was finally informed verbally by the controller of examinations that the marking of my daughter’s answer sheets was no doubt strict but there was no error in totaling. After I blew my cover and threatened to seek H.D. Shourie’s help in filing a PIL to force the CBSE to produce the actual transcripts, all communication with the board ceased. Fortunately my daughter just made it to the cut-off in the college of her choice. But my heart goes out to all those kids who are penalised for no fault of their own. Is it necessary for our children to be disillusioned by the system at such an early age?

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