The Central Board of Secondary Education on Thursday suggested the following formula — provisionally approved by the Supreme Court — for awarding marks to its outgoing Class XII students after this year’s exams were cancelled because of the pandemic.

Theory-practical

Different subjects will have different weightages for the theory and practical-internal assessment (IA) portions. The weightage for the theory portion will vary from 80 per cent (for example, languages) to 70, 60, 50 or 30 per cent (for example, painting), with the practical-IA portion accordingly accounting for 20 to 70 per cent.

Theory components

⚪ Scores obtained in the Class XII exams will be accorded 40 per cent weightage while calculating the theory marks in each subject.

In Class XII, the schools conduct unit tests, a mid-term (half-yearly) test and a pre-board exam. It’s for the individual school result committee to decide whether to consider a student’s scores in all these exams and work out an average for each subject, or consider only one of the exams (pre-board), or some but not all.

⚪ The score obtained in the theory component of the Class XI final exam will get 30 per cent weightage.

⚪ The average theory component score from the student’s best three performing subjects out of the main five subjects in the Class X board exams will get the remaining 30 per cent weightage.

“This average will be uniformly awarded to all the Class XII subjects based on theory weightage,” the gist of the formula provided by the apex court says.

⚪ All this means that in a subject where the theory component is accorded 80 per cent weightage, the Class XII marks will get an overall 32 per cent weightage and the Class XI and X marks, 24 per cent each. In a subject where the theory component accounts for 30 per cent weightage, the Class XII-XI-X weightage will be 12-9-9 per cent.

Practical/IA

The practical/internal assessment component will consist entirely of the actual practical/IA marks awarded in Class XII and uploaded by the school on the CBSE portal. Practical/IA marks are awarded just once in Class XII, and not with every exam.

Result committee

Each school will form a result committee of five members — the school principal (as chairperson), two senior-most teachers of the school who conduct Class XII classes, and two Class XII teachers from neighbouring senior secondary schools.

Moderation

As the marks obtained in the Class XI and Class XII exams will have been awarded by the schools themselves, they may not be strictly comparable across schools because of “variations in the quality of question papers, the evaluation standard and processes, the mode of conduct of exams, etc”, says the gist.

“To ensure standardisation, each school will have to internally moderate the marks by using a reliable reference standard.”

⚪ The particular year out of the previous three years in which the school performed the best in the Class XII board exams will be the reference year.

⚪ The average marks awarded by the school in any subject for 2020-2021 should be within a range of plus 5 or minus 5 from the average score obtained by its students in that subject in the reference year.

⚪ The average marks the school awards its students in 2020-2021 across all the subjects should not exceed the overall average marks obtained by its students in the reference year by 2 marks.

⚪ The school result committee must ensure that the students’ marks “are aligned with the broad distribution of marks provided by the board” — that is, the proportion of the schools’ students obtaining, say, an aggregate score above 90 per cent should be roughly the same as the proportion of students scoring 90 per cent across CBSE schools.

Physical exam

A physical Class XII board examination will be held “when the conditions become conducive” for “private, patrachar (correspondence) and 2nd-chance compartment candidates, etc” and students dissatisfied with the marks awarded to them.