New Delhi, Dec. 21: The Central Board of Secondary Education wants to end the artificial inflation of students' scores in the Class XII board exam but only if all the other school boards in the country end it too.

The governing body of the country's largest school board yesterday discussed its "moderation" policy, under which examinees are awarded up to 15 per cent extra marks in certain papers if the questions are deemed to have been too difficult.

It resolved to seek the Union human resource development ministry's help to get all the school boards to agree to ending the practice at one go. The topic was discussed though it was not part of the official agenda.

"A unilateral scrapping of the moderation would put CBSE students at a disadvantage (during undergraduate admissions). The government has to get all the boards to agree to do it," a member of the board told The Telegraph.

On receiving complaints that a particular question paper had been too difficult, the board now forms an expert panel to study the questions and recommend how many extra marks should be given to every examinee.

Up to 15 per cent extra marks have been awarded in "difficult" subjects like mathematics and physics in recent years, subject to the ceiling of 95 per cent.

This means a student who secured 80 per cent had her score raised to 95 but one who had scored 95 or more did not get any extra marks. The board members felt the "moderation" was unjust to the best students.

Such artificial enhancement had raised the number of CBSE students with 95 per cent aggregate scores twenty-fold between 2008 and 2014. Some Delhi University colleges have been forced to set 100 per cent as the first cut-off during admission to certain undergraduate courses.

Ashok Ganguly, who retired as CBSE chairman in 2008, said all the school boards were misusing the practice of "moderation" to prove the success of the Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation system, introduced in 2011 with increased focus on the pupils' co-scholastic abilities. "In my time, (moderation) was restricted to a maximum four or five per cent for a particular set of tough questions."

Ganguly said some boards were awarding up to 20 per cent extra marks. "A student told me he had scored more than the sum of the marks carried by the questions he had attempted in a certain subject."

Ganguly welcomed the move to scrap moderation but said the award of grace marks to help a student pass the exam should continue.

A school principal here, who didn't want to be named, agreed that grace marks should continue and that awarding 15 per cent extra marks to examinees securing 80 per cent was ridiculous.

The CBSE governing body also suggested that the difficulty level of questions should be uniform across a single paper, and between different papers across boards.

The ministry is likely to call a meeting of all the school boards to discuss the matter.

Replying to a question in the Lok Sabha on July 25, junior HRD minister Upendra Kushwaha had said the CBSE "adopts moderation policy to bring uniformity in evaluation process, to bring parity due to element of subjectivity in evaluation, to level up mean achievements due to difference in difficulty level of different sets of question papers, and to maintain parity of pass percentage of candidates across years and to compensate the candidates for difficulties experienced in solving the question in specified time".