Cosmetic changes

THE Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has announced that in order to ‘avoid unhealthy competition’ among students, it would stop releasing merit lists for the Class X and XII exam results. The board has also decided to issue merit certificates to the top 0.1% of the students, and to stop classifying them in the first, second and third divisions. On the face of it, and analysed in isolation, the decision is progressive because the pressure — self-imposed or extraneous — to score high in the CBSE exams causes great mental stress to students, many of whom are not equipped to deal with it at that stage in their lives. CBSE’s decision would also allow Class XII students to prioritise the core subject they wish to pursue at the undergraduate level, instead of focusing on all subjects in order to attain a high aggregate score.

The Common University Entrance Test (CUET) format gives students flexibility to zero in on the undergraduate course of their choice. The government has made CUET compulsory for admission to undergraduate courses in all Central universities, but the Class XII Board result would still remain relevant: The score would serve as the minimum eligibility criterion for CUET, and also as a tie-breaker for admission in case several students have the same CUET score. Class XII scores would also be taken into consideration for admission to several private and distance education universities, apart from foreign ones.

In the final analysis, though the CBSE’s decision to do away with merit lists is well-intentioned and could lead to easing of ‘unhealthy competition’, the plain truth is that with a large number of students vying for a limited number of seats, it’s impossible for them to be stress-free at any stage. Indeed, for admission to undergraduate courses, all colleges must go by the performance of students in some exam or the other, whether it’s Class XII Boards or CUET. For a student unable to make it to a preferred course or college, the stigma of being a ‘failure’ won’t go away by a mere jugglery of nomenclature.

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