Plea in HC to direct CBSE schools to publish docs on Class 10 marks criteria

NEW DELHI: A plea in the Delhi High Court on Monday sought direction to the CBSE-affiliated schools here to publish on their websites the rationale document of assessment criteria for class 10 students before finalising results for greater transparency.

The vacation bench of Justices C Hari Shankar and Subramonium Prasad said the matter be listed before another bench not comprising Justice Shankar. It listed the matter for hearing before another bench on June 30.

The application for the interim relief was filed in a pending petition in which the petitioner NGO, Justice For All, has sought to modify Central Board of Secondary Education's (CBSE) policy for tabulation of marks of class 10 board exams 2021 based on internal assessment conducted by the schools.

The application, through advocate Khagesh B Jha and Shikha Sharma Bagga, sought an interim order to direct all the schools affiliated by the board to publish the rationale document for devised criteria for the assessment of students of class 10 on their respective websites, before calculating the result and uploading the same on the CBSE portal, to bring transparency.

It said the students should be able access the document and raise grievances with the CBSE well in time along with the sagacious grievance redressal mechanism by the board for the students.

The application said that after issuance of notice by the court on June 2, a fresh FAQs have been published by the CBSE on June 9, and it became clear that there is no modification in their alleged arbitrary policy of moderation of marks yet, which is in violation of Article 21 (right to life) of the Constitution.

“The present policy is absolutely discriminatory, unfair, illogical and would result in huge manipulation of marks by the schools, based on the performance of the senior batch of students of that particular school,” it said.

The high court had on June 2 sought response of the Centre, Delhi government and CBSE on the NGO’s petition claiming that the policy of the board for calculating marks of class 10 students based on the internal assessment by schools was unconstitutional and required to be modified.

In its petition, the NGO has said, "The policy of moderating the average marks assessed by the school, based on the historical performance of the previous average result of the school, in terms of the best overall performance of the school would be injustice to the students as the performance of school is not relatable in any manner with the performance of the student."

It has also said moderating the marks in consonance with the overall average score of the district, national and state average "was absolutely unreasonable, illogical and punitive for the students of a school which would appear in the board exams for the first time", with no previous data of performance. The NGO has alleged that it can also lead to the manipulation of marks and exploitation, extortion of the students and parents.

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