Secretary of School Education, Mr. Anil Swarup wrote to the heads of all the state boards to stop the practice of spiking marks for Class 12^th students as this was leading to unrealistic cut-off marks for getting admission to the Delhi University. CBSE board has decided to stop inflating marks from this year onwards and the grace marks awarded will also be reflected in the mark sheet.

According to the policy, students are usually given extra or “grace marks” for attempting tough questions in examinations. However, these inflated scores force colleges to set their cut-off marks at 100%.

In response to his request 17 states has agreed to stop spiking marks in 12^th board examination. According to a source the following states have agreed to stop spiking marks:-

• Goa
• Telangana
• Nagaland
• Mizoram
• Manipur
• Jharkhand
• Jammu & Kashmir
• Assam
• Rajasthan
• Andhra Pradesh
• Uttarakhand
• Punjab
• Madhya Pradesh
• Kerala
• Himachal Pradesh
• Haryana
• Gujarat

And following states were yet to give their responses:-

• Odisha
• Tamil Nadu
• Maharashtra
• Bihar
• West Bengal
• Uttar Pradesh

This policy will provide a transparency to the marks award policy as it will be fair to the hard working students. Although some boards have decided to stay with their own marks awarding policy few have come forward to adopt the new policy.

However, the state boards are free to decide whether or not they want to continue with the moderation policy.

In April, the Central Board of Secondary Education had announced to scrap the policy allowing up to 15% extra marks for students attempting difficult questions. However, in May, the Delhi High Court had reversed the decision for the students who appeared in the Class 12 board examinations in 2017.

According to a Delhi University official “This could lead to slight dip in cut-off but it is difficult to quantify. Also, CBSE is not the only Board as we have many students from state Boards who apply to DU”.

With Information initially published at indianexpress.com/