This IAS officer did not let his CBSE exam results stop him in life

This picture has been used for representational purposes

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) declared class 10 and class 12 exam results this week, which has left some students elated and some disappointed with their marks. An IAS officer has now made it to the news for sharing his CBSE mark sheet to Twitter to explain to the students that life is much more than marks.

IAS officer Nitin Sangwan shared his CBSE certificate which shows that he scored 24 out of 70 marks in Chemistry, which is just one mark above the minimum passing score. In the caption, he wrote, "Life is much more than board results".

Shared on Tuesday, his tweet garnered more than 58,300 likes and over 15,000 retweets.

Talking about the motivation behind sharing his Class 12 board exam mark sheet, Sangwan was quoted as saying by NDTV, "When I saw friends and family members disappointed at scoring low marks, it struck me that my haalat (condition) was worse than theirs. The idea behind sharing my mark sheet on social media was to let them know that if I could do this much in life, so can they."

The IAS officer told the news website that the board exams for class 10 and 12 represent a milestone in life but it doesn't decide one's future. He said that the intention behind sharing his marks was to make students understand that it is not a big deal to fall in life and one can still get up and run again.

Sangwan, who is an alumnus of IIT Madras and cleared his civil service exams in 2015, requested parents and families to encourage students at a time when social media has become an integral part of one's life and they are facing pressure from the world at large. "In our time, peer pressure was limited to the people around us. Today, students suffer under the peer pressure of the whole world," he said.

Sharing examples of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who had dropped out of college to set up their companies, Sangwan said, "We need to understand that success does not depend on a degree or mark sheet and the purpose of education is not to score marks."

The CBSE had announced the results on the basis of an alternate assessment scheme after the pending exams were cancelled in view of the spike in COVID-19 cases. As per the four-pointer scheme, marks have been awarded on the basis of marks scored by a student in his or her best performing subjects.

With inputs from PTI

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