CBSE has scrapped the grace marks in board exams as per the plan of the Ministry of Human Resource and Development. This might also bring down the cut-off scores for admissions in colleges across the country. Earlier the board had requested the MHRD to take a decision on scraping the grace marks that had inflated the marks in the results to a considerable extent.
Presently, up to 15 per cent extra marks are granted to students for difficult papers. The board was of the opinion that all state boards should approve the plan else students would find it difficult for admissions for UG college if the grace mark policy is scrapped unilaterally.
There was a meeting held on 24th of April between chairmen of state boards and education secretaries of states where this issued was discussed in particular and tried to reach a consensus on the same while taking into account on the recommendations made by the CBSE.
At present, the board forms an expert panel that checks the question paper and decides on how much grace marks should be granted on receipt of complaints regarding the difficulty level of questions for each paper. Due to this, between the years 2008 to 2014, the marks of students who had scored above 95 per cent inflated to a considerable extent. Hence certain colleges under Delhi University had to raise their cutoffs to 100 per cent in some cases.
The official was of the opinion that the grace marks would be an unjust move on students who performed their best as their cutoff scores would get affected by them. Thus the board has suggested that the level of difficulty of questions should be uniform between various papers among boards and for a single paper.
Finally, one of the widely discussed topics of discussion among academic circles was to bring parity regarding the subjectivity of answer sheet evaluation on grace marks awarded to them.
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