Wednesday, Jan 28, 2009
Chennai: All universities in the State have been told to delay the first semester examination results to introduce a new mark normalisation system.

“The mark system needs to be changed to reflect the Choice Based Credit System that we have introduced this year,” says A. Ramasamy, Vice-Chairman of the Tamil Nadu State Council for Higher Education. This means that apart from marks, a student’s credits must be included in his marksheet, but it also means that his marks will now be determined according to a system of relative grading or normalisation. “Earlier, a student scoring 40 per cent would just be given 40 marks. Now, if the top student in the class scores 86, that will become the base. That will be treated as the 100,” said Prof. Ramasamy, explaining the normalisation system. “Then you calculate the score of 40 according to that, which will then become 46 or 47 marks.”

Each university or autonomous college will work as a separate unit, calculating marks for all their students, including those in affiliated colleges, based on their top students’ performance.

This is the same system of normalisation that is currently used to calculate Class 12 marks of students from different boards for the purposes of professional college admissions in the State.

Prof. Ramasamy says the system is being introduced to reflect the Western grading system, just as the CBCS is borrowed from Western universities. “It is to the advantage of the student…It will also reduce the number of failures, and make it easier to pass,” he said.

According to sources in the Department of Higher Education, what is being attempted is uniformity in the calculation of marks and award of credits.

It is not clear whether the TANSCHE system will take average performances into account, or only the topper’s performance.

A number of American universities do grade students based on their relative performance in comparison to their classmates. However, most of them take the average performance of a class into account, using the system of grading on a bell curve. This is also the system followed by the Indian Institutes of Technology. Also, these institutes use grades rather than marks.

The TANSCHE has decided to provide universities with software to help calculate the normalised marks.

Since this software is still being developed, the council has written to the universities, asking them to put off the declaration of the results by at least three weeks for this batch of students, the first to sit for the undergraduate and postgraduate examinations under the CBCS.

The move was brought up at a meeting of Controllers of Examinations from State universities, convened by the TANSCHE last week.