There were very few complaints from students, says an official

The Central Board of Secondary Education will discontinue the practice of re-evaluation of marks for all subjects from 2017.

As of now, the board re-evaluates the marks for Class 12 students, for 10 of the roughly 250 subjects, if a student is not satisfied with marks. The practice of re-evaluation, however, is not old: it has begun in 2014.

A senior CBSE official said the reason for discontinuing it was that there were very few complaints from students and, among the requests received, a negligible number were found to be genuine ones.

“The requests for re-evaluation are too few: just about 1.8 per cent of the candidates who appeared for Class 12. Among these too, very few are found to be genuine requests. Just about 0.05 per cent of the requests — which would be about 500 candidates — are found to be genuine,” the official said.

He said the evaluation system already had a three-tier process, and this ensured there was little possibility of an error. The official said the CBSE had also to prepare to hold the compartment examinations each year and, given this pressure and the low number of re-evaluation requests, it had decided to discontinue re-evaluation.

Asked what would happen to the few students who did have genuine complaints regarding evaluation if re-evaluations are discontinued, CBSE chairman Rajesh Chaturvedi said an internal committee could look into the few genuine complaints and take a decision.

CBSE officials said they were receiving a variety of responses from people on whether the optional nature of Class 10 boards should continue. However, a large number of people felt that the dual system in place was confusing.