Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
My son came home yesterday with a question that stopped me cold. “Mom, can I just skip the board exams next year? I am going to take the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) anyway. What’s even the point?”
He’s sixteen. He will be appearing for his Class 12 Board exam in 2027. After everything that’s unfolded this year, and the anxiety spiralling through WhatsApp parent groups like wildfire, I couldn’t summon the confident maternal reassurance I wanted to give him. Because, honestly, I didn’t have a good answer to his question.
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I grew up in an India where your Class 12 percentage was essentially your social credit score.
It determined whether you were “bright” or “average,” whether aunties at weddings congratulated your parents or offered them a sympathetic cup of chai. A 90% was genuinely exceptional, something that got your name in local newspapers, and made relatives invoke your example at family gatherings for years afterward.
That India feels very far away now. And yet, here we are, still tethered to the same examination and result system, watching our children buckle under its weight.
That is the reason so many students still desperately want to get their CBSE Class 12 marks re-evaluated this year. Because the marksheet matters.
Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan told India Today TV on May 28 that he expects, “20 per cent of the four lakh students who requested their answer scripts to apply for re-evaluation.”
This works out to roughly 80,000 students asking the board to check its work again.
It’s easy to dismiss that as a percentage. It’s harder when you realise that each of those applications belongs to a teenager sitting at a dining table somewhere, trying to make sense of a result they no longer fully trust.
THE YEAR THE EXAM LOST ITS INNOCENCE
Let me be clear about what happened this year.
For the first time, the board adopted large-scale On-Screen Marking (OSM), with evaluators assessing scanned copies of answer sheets instead of physical scripts. What was meant to make evaluation more efficient quickly spiralled into one of CBSE’s biggest post-result controversies in years.
Students complained of unexpectedly low scores, questions were raised over missing pages, incomplete scans, unchecked answers and technical glitches. Within days, more than four lakh students had sought access to their answer sheets, requesting over 11 lakh answer books.
We reported on this unfolding mess in an article published on May 27. Read it here.
Since then, the controversy has taken another unexpected turn. A 17-year-old Class 12 student has published a detailed analysis claiming that flaws in the CBSE tender process may have contributed to the problems surrounding the OSM rollout.
Just a year older than my son, he wasn’t spending his summer debating college applications or career choices. He was pouring over procurement documents, tender clauses and evaluation criteria, trying to understand how a system that affects millions of students may have gone so badly wrong.
There is something remarkable, and deeply unsettling, about that.
The most striking part of this entire episode wasn’t the complaints themselves. It was what they revealed. For perhaps the first time, large numbers of students and parents weren’t asking, “How many marks did I get?” They were asking, “Can I trust the marks I got?”
My son was watching all of this unfold in real time. Social media overflowed with testimonies from teenagers who had studied for months, only to find their efforts potentially invalidated by failures they had no role in creating.
The Union Education Minister even acknowledged “isolated incidents” and promised stringent action, but the damage to public trust, and to the mental health of an entire cohort of students, has been profound to say the least.
“I studied for two years, sacrificed my weekends, gave up everything,” one Class 12 student from Delhi told India Today.in. “And now I don’t even know if my marks are correct.”
My son saw that clip too, and he has been anxious ever since.
THE NUMBERS THAT HAUNT US
Here’s the paradox that makes this conversation so difficult. In 2004, about 20% of those who took the CBSE Class 12 test scored above 75%. A score of 90% placed you comfortably in the top 5-6% of examinees, making it a genuine marker of academic excellence.
In 2024, the pass percentage had significantly risen to 87.98%, with over 22,000 students scoring above 95%. The number of students scoring 90% and above has ballooned to the point where it’s not considered exceptional any more. In many competitive urban circles, it is almost expected.
What changed? Grade inflation, for one. The shift to a more lenient marking policy. The explosion of coaching centres that have turned test-taking to a science. And perhaps a collective societal pressure that made anything below 90% feel like failure.
“The exam has become a victim of its own success. When everyone achieves high marks, the marks themselves lose meaning. But we haven’t built alternative systems of assessment that can replace what boards were supposed to measure,” Dr Devparna Banerji, CEO of an Edtech platform in Rajasthan, told us.
WHY CLASS 12 MARKS STILL MATTER (EVEN WHEN IT SHOULDN’T)
Here’s where my son’s question gets complicated.
He’s right that, emotionally and culturally, we have moved on. The hysteria around board exams has faded. Newspaper topper lists either don’t exist or they don’t generate the same buzz. Parents no longer display marksheets like trophies (at least not openly). That narrative has shifted to entrance exams, JEE, NEET, CUET, CAT, and increasingly to skills, portfolios, and startup hustle.
But structurally, the Class 12 marksheet remains quietly indispensable.
Consider this; eligibility for JEE Advanced requires a minimum 75% in Class 12 (or placement in the top 20 percentile). Medical aspirants need a minimum 50% aggregate to qualify for NEET counselling. Most Indian universities continue to use Class 12 marks as a threshold, even when admissions are primarily based on CUET scores.
And for students like my son who want to study abroad, the picture is more complex than he realises. US universities prioritise SAT scores, essays, and extracurriculars, but they also review your high school transcript. Your Class 12 marks are very much part of the equation.
UK universities often have explicit minimum percentage requirements for Indian applicants. Canadian universities routinely ask for predicted or final Class 12 results as part of conditional offers.
“There’s a misconception that if you’re going abroad, Indian board marks don’t matter. They absolutely do. They’re not the only thing, but they are often a threshold. If your marks are significantly below expectations, admissions officers notice,” says Adarsh Khandelwal of Collegify, an overseas education consultancy.
So my son can’t actually skip his boards. Not without closing doors he doesn’t even know exist yet.
THE EMOTIONAL TAX WE DON’T TALK ABOUT
I have been speaking to other parents over the past few weeks, and what strikes me most is the undercurrent of shared exhaustion.
“My daughter cries every Sunday evening because Monday means another mock test,” says Preeti Sharma, a Noida-based marketing professional whose daughter is in Class 12. “I keep telling her it will be fine, but after what happened this year, I am not sure that I believe it myself.
Rajesh Menon, a Bengaluru-based IT consultant, puts it more bluntly, “We are asking children to perform at peak levels for an examination that may or may not be conducted fairly, may or may not matter for their actual career, but will definitely affect their mental health. What are we doing?”
The data backs him up. A study by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights found that exam stress was the largest cause of self-reported anxiety among Indian teenagers. Even the Lancet noted in its Global Mental Health report (2024) that India has the highest rates of academic stress-related mental health problems.
WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY
For this article, we also spoke to several educationists to understand whether the tension between the emotional obsolescence of board exams and their structural persistence, can ever be resolved.
Dr Krishna Kumar Anand, a professor at IIT Delhi, answered directly. “The board examination was designed for a different era, when higher education was scarce and you needed a brutal filtering mechanism. That scarcity no longer exists in the same way. We need to ask what the exam is actually selecting for and whether that’s what we value.”
Professor Pankaj Chandra, former director of IIM Indore and current vice-chancellor of a private university in Chandigarh, offered a more pragmatic view. “We can’t abolish board exams overnight; too much of our system depends on them as a common benchmark. But we can reform them to test different capabilities like critical thinking, application, and collaboration. The exam should evolve, not disappear.”
WHAT I AM TELLING MY SON TODAY
So where does this leave us — me, my son, the millions of families navigating this same impossible conversation today? I have told him the truth, as best as I understand it.
I have told him that yes, the system is flawed. That what happened this year was a failure of institutions that should have done better. That his anxiety is valid, and his frustration is justified.
But I have also told him that opting out isn’t really an option, not because the exam deserves his respect, but because the world still demands its credentials. The marksheet remains a key, even if it is a rusting one. His job isn’t to fight the system at sixteen; it’s to navigate it as smartly as he can while preserving his sanity and sense of self.
And I have told him (this part was harder) that I don’t have all the answers. That I am scared too. That watching him go through this makes me feel helpless in ways I didn’t expect. He looked at me for a long moment after I said that. “Okay, I will take the exam. But I am not going to let it define me.”
I hope that is a promise he can keep. I hope India builds a system that makes keeping it easier. I hope, most of all, that by 2027, we’ll have learnt something from the failures of 2026.
But hope, as every Indian parent knows, is not a strategy. So we will prepare, we will study, we will do what we have always done… we will play the board game, even as we quietly wonder whether the rules were ever fair to begin with.
(The author is a journalist and mother of one, currently based in Noida. She writes on education, parenting, and the small negotiations that make up family life)
– Ends
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
