Thiruvananthapuram: The Kerala State Sports Council has decided to bring under its umbrella the students following the CBSE and ICSE streams also to give them proper exposure to sports activities. It will organise a sporting meet for them next year based on the demands of the CBSE schools, said Ms Indira Rajan, general secretary, Kerala State CBSE School Management Association.
The first state-level meet will be held on January 30 and 31 in under-14 and under-17 categories for boys and girls. The number of events will be restricted to races of 100, 200, 400, 800, 1,500 and 3,000 metres, shot put, long jump, high jump and relays. District meets should be held before January 20, said Mr T.P. Dasan, president, Sports Council. Apart from private schools, Kendriya Vidyalayas and Navodayas will also take part in the competition. The first and second prize winners can attend the state-level competition, said Mr Dasan.
The CBSE students will not get grace marks for winning the competition. But grace marks are awarded for excellence in arts and sports and participation in NCC and scouts for the state syllabus students. However, there was a move at the national level to do away with grace marks. As per reports, at a meeting organised by the CBSE, 32 school boards have agreed to scrap the policy of marks moderation and grace marks. The participants agreed to publish their grace marks policy on the official website and also disclose the number of grace marks awarded to a candidate. The state government has to decide on discontinuing the grace marks as education is in the concurrent list.
The CBSE had recently relaxed the rules to allow students from its affiliated schools to take part in national and international meets without worrying about the dates of the annual examinations. The school principal can now inform the regional CBSE office about a student’s participation in a sporting event and the board will allow the student to write the exams for the corresponding subjects later.
The CBSE had appealed to the HRD ministry that its students would suffer during college admissions if other boards continued with their liberal marks, and pushed for a uniform policy on the issue. There were complaints that the system of awarding grace marks for state syllabus schools was disadvantageous to the CBSE and ICSE students in engineering admission. The admissions were being conducted from 2009 as per the recommendations made by an expert committee which wanted the state engineering rank list to be prepared by giving equal weightage to plus-two marks and the entrance mark after a normalisation process. With grace marks being added to the total marks for the public examinations, many state syllabus students get more marks for the qualifying examinations.
Following this, a large number of students had been migrating from the CBSE to state syllabus higher secondary every year to ensure better prospects in engineering entrance. Even students with 80 per cent marks have been migrating to state syllabus plus-two. The curriculum sub-committee of the state government recommended that only CBSE students, who have appeared for the board examination and not the school-level examination be considered eligible for the admissions to plus-one in the state syllabus higher secondary schools. This was later approved by the government in 2012. As a result, the sports and arts festivals in state syllabus had become an easy way to garner grace marks for ensuring admissions to higher courses. This had resulted in malpractices also.
