Skip to main content

CBSE rockets



I have been associated with CBSE for the last 17 years, both as a teacher and an examiner. When I completed just one year of teaching with that Board of education I was appointed as an examiner. I hesitated to take up the duty and informed the concerned authority about my lack of experience. “You have 15 years of experience as a teacher,” the authority told me on phone. He had my entire CV in front of him, apparently. I was forced to join the duty. On the very first day, I got just what I wished to avoid. As soon as I completed checking the first answer script, I was ordered to be magnanimous. The Head Examiner as well as the Nodal Officer (the authority who spoke to me on phone) re-examined that script and showed me how I had awarded much less marks than the examinee “deserved”.

   I realised that CBSE was as magnanimous as the North-Eastern Hill University for which I evaluated answer scripts for a year or two. I learnt the lesson quickly. I’m a quick learner when it comes to things like this. I continued to be an ‘exemplary’ examiner of CBSE ever since. I had learnt the trick: award marks wherever you can, however you can, for whatsoever you can.

   Students are happy to get 98%. Parents are happy. Schools are happy. Why should you grudge anyone their happiness? Yet I found myself agreeing with Bikram Vohra who wrote about this insane system today in the Times of India calling it the CBSE albatross.

   My best student of the Commerce batch this year told me with a wry smile how she could not make it in the selection list of a particular college despite having a percentage that would raise the envy of quite many students. It became a stunning realisation for me because the college where she was seeking admission was none other than my own alma mater, the very same college where I studied for five years. I had got admission there on the basis of merit though my percentage was abashedly far below my student’s. In fact, with that unmentionable percentage I had stood at the fourth rank in the admission list then, in the general category.

   Those were days when examiners were like the God of the Bible: eager to condemn. Now we (examiners including me) are like the monsoon clouds showering boundlessly so that no soil shall be left arid.  “Give everyone a chance to think beyond the traditional occupations,” as the Nodal officer told me during my first experience with CBSE. Yes, we are sending our examinees to the seventh heaven on rockets of marks and grades. So, dear Bikram Vorah, you may have to change your metaphor from albatross to rockets just as I changed my approach as soon as I laid my hands to the CBSE plough.


Comments

  1. As a CBSE Examiner, I too have learnt similar lessons. And the students who might not have crossed 70 to 83 in class 9 and class 10 till I taught them have now secured 88 to 93 in the recent CBSE results in English! I don't know whether to feel proud of them or call it my hypocrisy to congratulate them happily.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's not hypocrisy; I take it as sheer fun. Comedy, in fact. Bikram Vorah, the writer in ToI, makes fun of it labelling today's students as better than Shakespeare. He's right: we're creating students who can't even write sentences correctly though they score 98%! We're helpless in this.

      Delete
  2. This is just one part of the problem that our education system has. The whole thing has to restructured to make it more meaningful and beneficial for the students, as well as make it more representative of the real mettle of each student. Now marks are no indication of a student's interest or competence.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...