Beyond the 500: Are soaring board marks true measure of success?

by Shoaib Shabir Khan

The 2025 annual 10th and 12th regular examination results declared are so weighty that applause to every student who appeared is due upon us. Both the 10th and 12th classes having an aggregate passing percentage of around 85%, outcompeting the past trends, is a treat to witness. Girls again outshone boys, leaving them a bit behind. Results again, as compared to past years, show the upward trajectory of grades in the helm of candidates, mostly girls turning out to be more blessed. This result was way ahead of age-old convention, and countless students got marks in the 490s, and even many fetched 500 out of 500.

This is great and must be acknowledged to the fullest, as getting better grades implies the year-on-year growth and reflects the efforts invested by students.
Academics in our society decide the worth of a child, and marks are the measuring rod of assessing the worthiness, mainly 10th and 12th board marks, of which the Jammu and Kashmir Board of School Education is the warden. The percentage decides the spot in a hierarchy. For example, one getting over 90% is a bright, intelligent student; above 80% is considered an average student; and one with the first division is mediocre, and as such in the decreasing order.

The question that arises amid these gigantic grades in subsequent results are:

Are these towering figures reliable and worthy?
Aren’t these marks scored via rote learning?
Are our children so brainstormed that scoring these grades appears fun to them?
Isn’t our syllabus static and non-empirical, wherein it is easy to fetch any grades?
Is paper marking done keenly without any leniency?
Is our schooling so fruitful that any board exam is a piece of cake to our children?
What are these huge grade graphs contributing in the near future when competitive exams approach with the reality checks?

The above questions must be looked at realistically and answered honestly. Yes, potentially our children are indeed very vibrant and fertile. Then what is acting as a barrier to them for going dynamic and beyond set standards? Let me try to sum up some issues about why our school grades appear colorful , and life ahead full of chaos and strayed.

A frozen syllabus and an unaltered paper pattern give an edge in securing good grades.
Rote learning via teacher’s notes is often a task to accomplish.
Marks’ centric approach being the sole requirement.
Studying “what” rather than “why” surely gives us good grades but at the cost of a practical brainstorming approach.
Moreover, syllabus relaxation has been a regular phenomenon for many years now, which gives an undue advantage in piling up the digits.

Gone are the days when results used to be of a different stature, wherein it was very difficult to score this much. So what changed overnight: the content of students or the marking pattern of evaluators? If the former is the case, then so good; if the latter, then it must be checked and addressed.

The age-old syllabus definitely helps in getting a good percentile but with little or no contribution to STEM learning. Yes! We do encourage our wards to prioritise medical and non-medical streams on the basis of marks they secure in their boards, but the repercussions showcase otherwise. Marks a child gets act as a catalyst in determining his further branch of education, be it science, humanities or whatever, again on the basis of what I called a bright, average or mediocre child in the beginning. Mark’s centric approach over critical thinking and reasoning has eaten up the brains, and we decide “what to do” and not “why to do”.
Malcolm had rightly said that “education is the passport to the future”, but he never meant the elephantine grades without the roadmap.

We have a deficit in reaching out to IITs, IIMs, institutions of excellence, top medical colleges and whatnot. And the question again hits: who will be the space filler in such a big void? Had school education been inclusive of all materials required for creating an enthusiastic and prepared lot, the story would have been something different. A deficit in producing the civil servants, doctors, engineers , entrepreneurs has a link somewhere with our schooling grades, wherein there is a mismatch between the child’s potential and the field opted merely on the basis of marks secured in boards. One who could have been a civil servant ends up writing ‘N’ numbers of NEET exams just because his board marks excited him to opt for biology.

“Schools are our primary institutions of socialisation, and JKBOSE in the UT of Jammu and Kashmir is their guardian; therefore, a 360-degree overhaul is much more required in every parcel of it, be it syllabus, paper pattern, inclusion, paper evaluation, or what not. The lot we produce every passing year must be produced productively, and realism is a necessity.”

The author can be mailed at ks641673@gmail.com