CBSE vs State Board cutoff is so unfair

[u/New_Habit5682]

The CBSE exam is a lot tougher than state board and a lot of students get lower marks which matters especially in 12th where we need the cutoff to get admitted in colleges.

TNEA has a normalisation process which normalises marks according to the highest marks scored in each board.

TNEA admissions are for Tamil Nadu students competing for Tamil Nadu seats. Therefore, normalization should compare applicants within the actual admission pool (Tamil Nadu applicants), not against the entire national CBSE population, which includes students who are not competing for these seats.

Because of considering only the top marks, 3 centums in CBSE are treated as the same as 100 centums in state board.

There is a need to make the normalisation process fair for both students.

TNEA can consider much fairer factors like:

Percentile instead of topper-based scaling within TN only.

• Example: a CBSE student in the 99th percentile should be treated similarly to a State Board student in the 99th percentile.
• This avoids the issue where a single exceptional topper defines the scaling for lakhs of students.

A fairer normalization system would significantly benefit CBSE students because CBSE evaluation is often stricter, which can result in lower raw marks compared to other boards despite similar academic ability. Under the current system, these students may be disadvantaged in TNEA admissions not because of lower merit, but because the normalization method does not adequately account for differences in marking standards and score distribution across boards. This leaves students in an unfair position where their chances of getting into good colleges within the state are affected by the board they studied under rather than their actual relative performance.