Even as the Central Board of Secondary Education has replaced marks with grades and a Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA), there remains a paradox.
An analysis of the new system shows that it's possible for a student with a higher percentage in the CBSE Class X examination to get a lower CGPA than a student with a lower percentage, reports Times of India.
The inference is only possible in a place like Maharashtra, where schools have been provided marks as well as grades and grade points. In other states where the CBSE board has not released students' marks, this would not have been possible.
According to the new system, a score of 91-100 in a subject is equivalent to A1 grade and a CGPA of 10. Similarly 81-90 equals an A2 grade and a CGPA of 9, 71-80 works out to a B1 grade and a CGPA of 8 and so on.
Avnita Bir, principal of RN Podar School in Santa Cruz, where 55 students scored a CGPA of 10, and 102 students scored 91% and above, carried out an analysis of the correlation between grades, marks and grade points. She has shared real-life examples with TOI —of the scores that students from her school got — to highlight the paradox in the new system. A student called Himani scored 91.2% in the CBSE exams with a CGPA of 9.4 while her classmate Akash scored 1% less and yet had a higher CGPA of 9.6.
The reason? While Hemani had scored exceptionally high marks in some subjects, and less in others, Akash's scores were more or less uniform throughout, pointed out Bir. There were subjects for which both scored the same grade and grade point, though Himani scored higher marks.
"There's an interesting inference to be drawn from this. With the new system, it pays to be jack of all trades and master of none. Those who perform uniformly across subjects get a higher CGPA than those who score very high in some subjects and less in others," said Bir.
While it's easy to correlate grades with grade points for an individual subject, it's virtually impossible to do so for the cumulative grade point average, which is the average of the grade points in each of the five subjects.
So, for instance, if a student gets an A1 in maths, the grade point works out to 10. But if the cumulative grade point average is in decimals (eg, 9.5) it's hard to figure out whether a student's overall grade is A1, which corresponds to a CGPA of 10, or A2, which corresponds to a CGPA of 9.
The solution, feels Bir, is to shift from percentages to CGPAs without worrying about an overall grade.
