Using percentile score as a means of normalization performance across boards was mooted by the ISI expert committee consulted by the Ramasami Committee.

In their report, the ISI expert committee states two assumptions, under which percentile score could be used. The first essentially says that grading is consistent in the sense that marks will increase from less meritorious to more meritorious. The second assumption is that merit distribution is same in all boards.

Of course, merit is not directly observable, what is observed and measured is academic preparedness. Then the second assumption essentially states that all boards have the same (or, nearly same) standard, in the sense that the distribution of academic preparedness of students across boards is the same.

Both the assumptions are questionable. About the first: how does one factor in variation in the grading process by different graders. The second assumption too does not seem to hold. Many people feel from their experience that CBSE board students are better prepared than many state school boards. There's one study that has gone into the question of quality of different school boards. It's called 'Quality Education Study' managed jointly by Wipro and Educational Initiatives. Item 3 (page 6) of their Executive Summary says: 'Significant differences in schools affiliated to different boards and in different cities: The finding from boards-wise comparison reveals that schools from Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) and Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) performed among the top 2 and differences with other Boards were statistically significant. CISCE also performed significantly better than CBSE.'

In any case, the MHRD should have tested out the two assumptions to check the error band within which these can be accepted and only then used percentile score factoring in the error band.

Also, in their recommendations, the ISI expert committee says: 'The above analysis regarding the stability of board scores should be carried out for all boards for a longer period of time.' They say that percentile rank may be used for normalization only after the stablity is found to hold in the analysis above.

To the best of our knowledge, the MHRD is yet to carry out the analysis above.

It is obvious that the present normalization process will penalize smaller and/or better school boards. All this will do is to encourage students not to look for a board where the academic standard is high, rather than to migrate to a large and lax boards.