The Indian Certificate of Secondary Education (ICSE) is an examination conducted by the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examination, a private board of school education in India. It has been designed to provide an examination in a course of general education, in accordance with the recommendations of the New Education Policy 1986 (India), through the medium of English. Students are allowed to choose any five out of the following with the sixth one, English being compulsory. Subjects are offered in an array of combinations, based on the stream of education, and school picked. The examination allows secure suitable representation of governments responsible for schools (which are affiliated to it) in their states or territories. Private candidates are not permitted to appear for this examination.
In the year 2015, the human resource development ministry had asked the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE), which conducts the ICSE and the ISC examinations, to furnish evidence to justify its existence.
The reason for this was reportedly attributed to moderation; a practice also followed by Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), it involved tweaking candidates' marks to account for paper variances.In 2013, a 20-year-old Indian student studying in the US, DEBARGHYA DAS, claimed in his personal blog to have downloaded the ICSE scores for over 100,000 students by scraping.His analysis of the data showed interesting patterns in the marking system, suggesting that the marks were rounded off with no student getting over 33 marks out of a possible 100. The reason for this was reportedly attributed to moderation; a practice also followed by Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), it involved tweaking candidates' marks to account for paper variances.