CBSE Results 2020: A lot of students' questions still unanswered

Telangana’s Indrakiran Rao fell ill during his CBSE Class XII board examinations and missed writing one paper. He was marked absent for that paper and is now scared that he may fail.

His school also does not have clarity about what happens to candidates whose papers were not cancelled due to COVID-19 but missed for other reasons. Under ordinary circumstances, Satpathy would have failed and been asked to write a compartment exam for that particular subject.

But, under the new assessment scheme by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), all remaining papers have been cancelled due to the Coronavirus outbreak getting worse in India. CBSE had told the Supreme Court on June 26 that it will declare the board examination results by July 15.

Even though this new assessment scheme has been presented by the board, there are several unanswered questions among the students.

What happens if a student contracted coronavirus and missed multiple papers? What if a student fell sick and missed the examinations? What if a Delhi student was absent during the internal assessment and pre-boards?

Moneycontrol wrote to CBSE seeking a clarification. But, the board did not respond to these queries.

Under the assessment scheme, students who have appeared for exams in more than three subjects, the average performance in three best performing subjects will be awarded for the remaining subjects where exams could not be conducted.

For example, if a student has already given examinations for History, Political Science, Economics and English subjects and Hindi, Geography are pending, marking for the last two subjects will be an average of the highest three marks scored.

For those who have appeared for less than three subjects, the average performance in two best performing subjects will be awarded for the remaining subjects where exams could not be conducted.

The assessment scheme also said that for students from Delhi who have only appeared for exams in one to two subjects, results will be declared based on the performance in these subjects and internal assessment and practical tests.

Moneycontrol has received letters from CBSE students with cases where the candidate has missed the papers. These students want to stay anonymous due to the fear of being reprimanded by their respective schools.

Take a Class XII CBSE student from Cuttack in Odisha. This student has given his Physical Education, English and Physics papers. But due to illness he missed his Chemistry and Biology papers. Now his Hindi paper was remaining which has been cancelled.

This student wrote to the Prime Minister’s Office but received a reply telling him that the assessment scheme is applicable to all students and asked him to check the official notification on CBSE website for more details.

Meanwhile, a CBSE official told this student that the assessment scheme won’t be applicable to students missing any paper. Now his anxiety has hit the roof and is wondering whether he will be passed or not.

Another case is of a Delhi-based student who was able to give only one paper due to the violence that hit her residential area in February 2020. As per CBSE’s terms this student’s results would be based on internal assessments.

Now here the glitch is that she had scored poor marks in some of the papers in the internal assessments but scored well in the practical examinations. How will she be assessed? Her school has no answers, yet.

For traditional school toppers, there are other worries.

Pune-based Neha Pant said that she has been topping her school examinations for the past five years and wanted the ‘winning streak’ to continue in the CBSE Class XII boards. With average marking being used, she is worried that the overall scores will be impacted since even a percentage lower could impact her chances at getting into a good university.

In institutions like Delhi University, even a 0.5 percent lower percentage would mean that students like her would not be able to get in.

For instance, the first cut-off in 2019 for Lady Shri Ram College for a BA (Political Science and Psychology) programme was 97 percent for the general category.