More than 400,000 examinees appearing for Higher Secondary (HS) 2004 will not have to worry about how many marks their examination efforts add up to.

If the West Bengal Council of Higher Secondary Education has its way, a student’s total marks will not find a place on the marksheet from this year.

So, for the first time, marksheets handed over to students are unlikely to mention any division.

Council officials say that in the revised system, marksheets will only carry the subject-wise score. The marksheets of successful and unsuccessful candidates will mention “passed” or “failed”, without any division.

Under the existing system, successful students are placed in three divisions. Those scoring 60 per cent and above are placed in the first division, between 45 per cent and 59 per cent in second division, and between 30 per cent and 44 per cent in third division.

“We are trying to streamline the process of conducting examinations and announcing results. This is one such effort,” said a senior HS council member.

The move to abolish mention of total marks on the marksheet is being planned by the council as a follow-up to its recent decision to abolish the system of publishing merit lists.

The council, as well as the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education, have decided to do away with the system of publishing merit lists for the Madhyamik and Higher Secondary examinations from 2004, on the basis of a recommendation of the Ranju Gopal Mukherjee education committee.

“The main purpose of not publishing merit lists is to reduce the stress that students suffer in the rat-race of scoring higher marks. The purpose of scrapping merit lists will not be served if the system of mentioning the students’ total marks is continued. But, we (the council) will finalise the decision in this regard after taking the opinion of a cross-section of people,” said Jyotirmoy Mukherjee, president, West Bengal Council of Higher Secondary Education.

Sources in the education department said the move of not mentioning total marks of students and divisions is being planned also as a preliminary measure before permanently replacing the age-old system of awarding marks with a system of grades from 2005.

Along with scrapping merit lists, the state government has introduced the system of assessing students with grades instead of marks from Class VI to Class VIII from this year. This is in response to a directive from the Centre, as well as a recommendation of the Ranju Gopal Mukherjee committee.

According to government plans, the grading system will be gradually introduced in all school-level examination, including the internal annual examinations in schools as well as the Madhyamik and HS-level exams.