As preliminary work continues for CBSE Grade 10 evaluations, school heads in the UAE stressed that no ‘grading scandal’ is possible under the procedures set for the tabulation.
Results are anchored on the schools’ best exam performance in the past three years. Schools have until June 30 to submit their Grade 10 students’ marks to the board.
Lalitha Suresh, principal of GEMS Our Own Indian School, said “the process is fool-proof”.
There’s no way schools can pull up marks or come up with grades to students’ disadvantage, Suresh said.
“I believe this is a very fair way of assessing students in a pandemic. Almost all schools would have undertaken internal assessments for their students. Luckily, in our school, we had conducted four full examinations for our Grade 10 students, of which one was conducted online in June 2020 and the other three were conducted face-to-face in school like any other year,” she added.
“The board has given the weightage for these assessments, the range of marks that can be allotted and the percentage of students in each range. This information is tracked by the board based on the previous best performance in the past three years of the school. So each school, based on the internal assessments, needs to place students under these ranges for each subject. The school also cannot exceed the average percentage of all students of the reference year selected by the board.”
The board, however, is yet to provide clarity on second languages other than Hindi.
Each CBSE-affiliated school was asked to form a committee inclusive of the principal and seven members, of which five should be the teachers of the same school handling key subjects and the other two are teachers from neighbouring schools.
Muhammad Ali Kottakkulam, principal of Gulf Indian High School, said: “The committee will prepare a rationale document based on which the result has to be prepared from school-based assessments which includes PTs, half yearly exams and pre-boards as per the weightage suggested by the board. This rough result data will be moderated to make it exactly on par with the referral year performance of the school in the historical data given by CBSE.”
Weightage has been given to periodic tests (10 marks), half yearly/mid-term (30 marks), and pre board exams (40 marks).
Deepika Thapar Singh, CEO-principal of Credence High School, said: “The assessment of 80 marks will be done by the school based on the marks scored on different test/exams during the year. If a school has conducted two or three periodic exams, it may be decided to take the average of the three exams or the best of three as considered suitable.”
Schools were urged to keep a check on ‘inflation of marks’ and award marks in consonance with its best performance in Class 10 in the last three academic years — 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2019-20.
© Khaleej Times
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