In 2020, NUJS introduced a new grading system in compliance with the UGC recommendations to switch to a uniform 10-point scale for awarding GPA’s. However, while the grading system was changed, no other changes were made to the examination pattern, which resulted in major issues for the batches subject to this new scale.
Introduced through the Academic and Examination Regulations, 2020, the scale is as follows:
10 - O (Outstanding) - >95%
9 - E+ (Excellent) - 90-95%
8 - A+ (Distinction) - 80-90%
7 - A (Very Good) - 70-80%
6 - B+ (Good) - 60-70%
5 - B (Average) - 50-60%
4 - C (Pass) - 40-50%
0 - F (Fail) - <40%
For comparison, before the new scale was introduced, NUJS was following a 7-point scale, applicable to the Batch of 2024 and above. In this scale, achieving a full score of 7/7 required scoring above 75% in a given examination. In the 10-point scale applicable to the Batches of 2025 and 2026, a full score of 10/10 requires 95% or above, a score which is almost never awarded in any examination conducted; it is important to note that almost all professors are awarding the same marks as they were under the previous scale, which now yield significantly lower grade points. This has caused the GPA’s for the Batches of 2025 and 2026 to plummet, with students rarely crossing 7/10.
No action was taken by the university authorities when concerns were first raised against this scale in 2020 by the Batch of 2025. In 2021, when the Batch of 2026 joined, the issue was flagged by both the batches together repeatedly and a modified grading scale was proposed to the university authorities by the Student Juridical Association (Student Body of NUJS) and the Academic Reforms Committee of the college.
Subsequently, the university authorities acknowledged the issue and relaxed the 10 pointer grading scale for the next batch, i.e the Batch of 2027, considering the fact that the previous grading scale was unrealistically high. However, it was stated by the university authorities that the grading scale for Batch of 2025 and 2026 cannot be changed as the results have already been released according to this scale, and the grades cannot be changed retrospectively, alleging that it would amount to “academic fraud”. It is important to note that within the Academic and Examination Regulations, 2020, no bar or restriction is placed on applying a revised grading scale on the same marks obtained by the students.
In the new scale introduced for the Batch of 2027, a full score of 10/10 is awarded when a student scores above 80% in an examination. While the Batches of 2026 and 2027 have scored similar marks across papers, the highest GPA for the Batch of 2026 for Monsoon Semester 2022 is a mere 7.3/10, while the highest GPA for the Batch of 2027 for the same period is a staggering 9.2/10. This discrepancy is only exacerbated when considering the batch averages instead of the highest scores.
The issue of the new 10 pointer grading scale was already flagged by the Batch of 2025 even before the Batch of 2026 and 2027 joined the university but due to the negligence and inordinate delay on the part of the university, only the Batch of 2025 and 2026 were made to suffer for no valid reason. A total of 250+ students are being affected due to this decision of the university authorities, affecting their placement opportunities and more importantly the post-graduation opportunities which are available to law students after graduation due to excessively low grades as the grading scale being used for Batch of 2025 and 2026 is unrealistically high.
The Academic Reforms Committee, as well as the Vice-Chancellor’s Office, reassured the Batch of 2025/26 that while they would not be implementing the revised grading scale for these batches, the professors would be sensitised to their peculiar grading scale, and would be awarding marks accordingly. No such steps can be seen to be taken, as the professors continue to award marks in the same manner they have previously.
If it were this clear cut, why would the administration immediately reverse their decision and implement an easier scale for the Batch of 2027? Please gyaan mat baato, uncle.
Good students are getting decent grades. Majority have stopped studying after the pandemic and are now using these excuses to justify why their results are bad or they aren't getting internships. No sympathy for you. Your current knowledge level shows that you should be in first year.
If the highest score in the batch is a 7.3, compared to a 9.2 for the immediate juniors, how are the good students still getting decent grades? Your current reading level shows you shouldn't be on a platform for legal students/lawyers.
If people from your batch aren't scoring well, then your skills should be increased, not the changing of the grading pattern. Matlab ajeeb level ki entitlement hai! Why not confess that with offline exams, you cannot cheat anymore and that's what has led to this 'discontent'?
Speaking as someone who recruits from the place, you are way overthinking this entire issue. The recruiter is not really going to make hair-split differences between whether your CGPA is 7/10 or 6/7 or such matters. At the most, the relative batch rank will count. As for higher studies, there the percentage of marks secured matters, not CGPA, which differs widely across institutions anyway. So I would advise you to cut out the melodrama about your future being ruined, study and learn and do your best during exams and other co-curricular activities and importantly, during internships. That way, your future will remain as secure as it gets. Peace out.
1. Just to assuage your immediate concerns, this won't impact placements really because they're entirely based on batch ranks. Even without change of grading systems, there used to huge differences in average scores on different batches based on the faculty who took particular courses for a batch. For instance, while the average CGPA of the top 10 rankers in Batch of 2018 may be 6.3/7, in another batch it could be 5.5/7. Even recruiters understand this and that is why they only look at ranks during recruitments.
2. This does create problems when applying for foreign university admissions where your 10 point CGPA will be judged against thousands of applicants from other universities. For that, I suggest:
- Come with a fair formula for converting marks on the 75% scale (that professors are still using) to a 95% scale.
- This is NOT academic fraud, it is called "moderation". Every secondary and higher secondary education board in the country (including ICSE and CBSE) does it to keep marks fairly consistent across batches regardless of difficulty of question papers.
- NUJS administration itself has "moderated" marks on multiple occasions. This is done especially if many students fail in a particular subject - say CPC or Contracts.
- This moderation has usually been done by the UG Council prior to publication of results. So ask for past UG Council minutes from the academic section. If they don't give it to you, you can RTI them.
3. Expanding on the last point, I don't know what the SJA is upto these days - but these kind of non-sensical decisions by the administration would not even be accepted/implemented if it was the past SJAs. The current system is not even UGC compliant. It is just a renamed 7 pointer scale where the numbers 1-7 have been changed to 4-10. Go through UG Council minutes, UGC Regulations, ask for Academic Council meeting minutes (I believe the new SJAs do not even have access to governing body minutes- it's the most thing to understanding what goes on in the University). If required, petition the Academic Council, file a writ. These administrative decisions won't even stand the basic rule of parity if brought before the High Court. Please, please, please, for duck's sake, STAND UP MORE ASSERTIVELY FOR YOUR RIGHTS!
Which law of parity does it break exactly? Which law actually says that parity in marking needs to be maintained between two different batches? Kindly do not spread misinformation. Moderation is done when there are a large number of failures or disproportionate number of top grades. To claim that university level moderation be done to change a 75 percentage to 90 will be laughed out of any court. Your legal knowledge is very suspect, even though your heart seems to be in the right place. I also agree with students being required to stand up for their own rights.
I fully support the admin on this. Grade inflation needs to be stopped. The unethical, mediocre profs who do this (to get good student feedback despite having no knowledge or teaching ability) should be SACKED. It's high time students STUDY. This pathetic, lazy generation is just feeding of the reputation created by alumni .
Professors do not give you the grades, they are still evaluating your paper using marks on a 100 scale. You are still getting the same percentage of marks. Just because there is a grade reserved for someone who may get 90% marks, does not mean that you deserve to get that grade. Earlier everyone who would get 75% or 90% would get the same grade, which was not fair. Now there is a grade for everyone based on what they score. If you perform to deserve 90%, you will get that grade. If you perform to get 60%, you will get that grade. Quit whining and appearing entitled. This is doing more harm to your future prospects than the grades. As it is, everyone knows the way you pandemic batches have got your grades in the last 2 years. That is more damaging insofar as recruiters are concerned. Buck up and compensate for that by increasing your knowledge level.
Ugh. It seems like the university was finally fixing the grading system to not allow for inflation and y’all just don’t want to deal.
To respond to someone above - no changing the grading scale post hoc is not moderation. It’s absolutely academic fraud. Moderation is what happens when there are too many high or low grades- and that’s very rare. When professors evaluate papers they automatically follow a bell curve most times.
How short sighted are law students ? Don’t you understand that grade inflation is bad for you? And if it’s left unchecked you’ll not be accepted into decent LLMs? If you get good grades because you wrote a petition - most people will think that grade is sus.
If most of the class is getting the top two grades it’s a flaming red flag that something wrong is happening in that grading. The top two grades should be reserved for about 30% of the class and no more. And if more than 5-10% are getting the top grade the university should moderate down.
For what it’s worth no recruiter or admissions officer care about your CGPA. They care about relative class rank - and even that only a little. You can overcome a poor class rank by working hard at co curriculars and internships and publishing.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t study- it’ll build good habits. Honestly topping law school classes is not even difficult - you just have to invest in your education and take it seriously. These are not extremely difficult exams.
And stop with all these post hoc reasoning. Just because you got away with committing academic fraud doesn’t make it right. Anyone with two brain cells can see that. Your word magic isn’t that powerful and it shows you’re a bad lawyer when you think it is. If y’all bullied the university into changing it’s approved grading system - that was very ethically questionable. If y’all get hired despite this hooliganism- that’s not vindication. It’s a reflection of market needs - y’all got lucky.
When the top two grades represent 85% and 90% respectively, then it is quite possible that in your batch, nobody performed well enough to secure either of those two.
Introduced through the Academic and Examination Regulations, 2020, the scale is as follows:
10 - O (Outstanding) - >95%
9 - E+ (Excellent) - 90-95%
8 - A+ (Distinction) - 80-90%
7 - A (Very Good) - 70-80%
6 - B+ (Good) - 60-70%
5 - B (Average) - 50-60%
4 - C (Pass) - 40-50%
0 - F (Fail) - <40%
For comparison, before the new scale was introduced, NUJS was following a 7-point scale, applicable to the Batch of 2024 and above. In this scale, achieving a full score of 7/7 required scoring above 75% in a given examination. In the 10-point scale applicable to the Batches of 2025 and 2026, a full score of 10/10 requires 95% or above, a score which is almost never awarded in any examination conducted; it is important to note that almost all professors are awarding the same marks as they were under the previous scale, which now yield significantly lower grade points. This has caused the GPA’s for the Batches of 2025 and 2026 to plummet, with students rarely crossing 7/10.
No action was taken by the university authorities when concerns were first raised against this scale in 2020 by the Batch of 2025. In 2021, when the Batch of 2026 joined, the issue was flagged by both the batches together repeatedly and a modified grading scale was proposed to the university authorities by the Student Juridical Association (Student Body of NUJS) and the Academic Reforms Committee of the college.
Subsequently, the university authorities acknowledged the issue and relaxed the 10 pointer grading scale for the next batch, i.e the Batch of 2027, considering the fact that the previous grading scale was unrealistically high. However, it was stated by the university authorities that the grading scale for Batch of 2025 and 2026 cannot be changed as the results have already been released according to this scale, and the grades cannot be changed retrospectively, alleging that it would amount to “academic fraud”. It is important to note that within the Academic and Examination Regulations, 2020, no bar or restriction is placed on applying a revised grading scale on the same marks obtained by the students.
In the new scale introduced for the Batch of 2027, a full score of 10/10 is awarded when a student scores above 80% in an examination. While the Batches of 2026 and 2027 have scored similar marks across papers, the highest GPA for the Batch of 2026 for Monsoon Semester 2022 is a mere 7.3/10, while the highest GPA for the Batch of 2027 for the same period is a staggering 9.2/10. This discrepancy is only exacerbated when considering the batch averages instead of the highest scores.
The issue of the new 10 pointer grading scale was already flagged by the Batch of 2025 even before the Batch of 2026 and 2027 joined the university but due to the negligence and inordinate delay on the part of the university, only the Batch of 2025 and 2026 were made to suffer for no valid reason. A total of 250+ students are being affected due to this decision of the university authorities, affecting their placement opportunities and more importantly the post-graduation opportunities which are available to law students after graduation due to excessively low grades as the grading scale being used for Batch of 2025 and 2026 is unrealistically high.
The Academic Reforms Committee, as well as the Vice-Chancellor’s Office, reassured the Batch of 2025/26 that while they would not be implementing the revised grading scale for these batches, the professors would be sensitised to their peculiar grading scale, and would be awarding marks accordingly. No such steps can be seen to be taken, as the professors continue to award marks in the same manner they have previously.
2. This does create problems when applying for foreign university admissions where your 10 point CGPA will be judged against thousands of applicants from other universities. For that, I suggest:
- Come with a fair formula for converting marks on the 75% scale (that professors are still using) to a 95% scale.
- This is NOT academic fraud, it is called "moderation". Every secondary and higher secondary education board in the country (including ICSE and CBSE) does it to keep marks fairly consistent across batches regardless of difficulty of question papers.
- NUJS administration itself has "moderated" marks on multiple occasions. This is done especially if many students fail in a particular subject - say CPC or Contracts.
- This moderation has usually been done by the UG Council prior to publication of results. So ask for past UG Council minutes from the academic section. If they don't give it to you, you can RTI them.
3. Expanding on the last point, I don't know what the SJA is upto these days - but these kind of non-sensical decisions by the administration would not even be accepted/implemented if it was the past SJAs. The current system is not even UGC compliant. It is just a renamed 7 pointer scale where the numbers 1-7 have been changed to 4-10. Go through UG Council minutes, UGC Regulations, ask for Academic Council meeting minutes (I believe the new SJAs do not even have access to governing body minutes- it's the most thing to understanding what goes on in the University). If required, petition the Academic Council, file a writ. These administrative decisions won't even stand the basic rule of parity if brought before the High Court. Please, please, please, for duck's sake, STAND UP MORE ASSERTIVELY FOR YOUR RIGHTS!
To respond to someone above - no changing the grading scale post hoc is not moderation. It’s absolutely academic fraud. Moderation is what happens when there are too many high or low grades- and that’s very rare. When professors evaluate papers they automatically follow a bell curve most times.
How short sighted are law students ? Don’t you understand that grade inflation is bad for you? And if it’s left unchecked you’ll not be accepted into decent LLMs? If you get good grades because you wrote a petition - most people will think that grade is sus.
If most of the class is getting the top two grades it’s a flaming red flag that something wrong is happening in that grading. The top two grades should be reserved for about 30% of the class and no more. And if more than 5-10% are getting the top grade the university should moderate down.
For what it’s worth no recruiter or admissions officer care about your CGPA. They care about relative class rank - and even that only a little. You can overcome a poor class rank by working hard at co curriculars and internships and publishing.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t study- it’ll build good habits. Honestly topping law school classes is not even difficult - you just have to invest in your education and take it seriously. These are not extremely difficult exams.
And stop with all these post hoc reasoning. Just because you got away with committing academic fraud doesn’t make it right. Anyone with two brain cells can see that. Your word magic isn’t that powerful and it shows you’re a bad lawyer when you think it is. If y’all bullied the university into changing it’s approved grading system - that was very ethically questionable. If y’all get hired despite this hooliganism- that’s not vindication. It’s a reflection of market needs - y’all got lucky.