All Boards Likely to Follow Common Curriculum from Next Year

The Union Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) has decided to implement a more scientific moderation policy and to restrain the unfair practice of awarding grace marks from the academic year 2018. This year, mainly due to the timing of Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE)'s decision to scrap moderation policy, the Delhi high court had disagreed with the board.

The Human Resource Development ministry has formed an inter-board working group (IBWG) comprising eight boards for working on the ways to discontinue the current moderation policy and upward revision, or malpractice of spiking marks. IBWG will set a model which is to be followed by all the boards.

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All education boards will have to adopt a common core curriculum, grades and marks for the extracurricular subjects will be given separately. The common grace marks policy will be published on websites. To bring uniformity across all states in assessment and difficulty levels of questions, the question papers will be shared by the CBSE with the other states using NCERT textbooks.

A senior HRD ministry official said that although the plan to do away with the moderation policy could not be implemented this year, the ministry is working out for all education boards from the next academic year. In fact, all boards have already accepted to terminate the process of spiking marks from next academic year. The official added that there were some boards who raised objections for implemented the plan this year at the meeting held on April 24, 2017 but have agreed to implement the same in the year 2018.

In the month of April, 32 school education boards have settled not to moderate marks this year, but the Delhi High Court directed the CBSE to continue implementing it. Also, there were some other boards who continued with the practice of raising the marks.

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The official encouraging the boards like Karnataka and Punjab which made an effort to stick to the consensus, said that there were few boards not following the moderation marks policy this year and this could be clearly seen in the results. Although there are quite a few of them, it's a good start.

An IBWG member told that they have a year time to plan out things and initiate wider consultation as the states are already on board. Implementing the plan in this crucial time will affect the student's results adversely. The member added that more attention will be given to the board's opinion and their concerns will be addressed.