Every year the same rumour goes around: that the board quietly adds marks, or that it doesn't and people are coping. Nobody settles it, because settling it needs two documents that almost nobody puts side by side — your evaluated answer scripts and your marksheet.

I have both. The evaluated script prints a Total Marks figure on page one. The marksheet prints a theory figure months later. For 3 of my five subjects, those two numbers are identical.

That's what makes the other two readable. If the script's figure were something else — a raw score before some other adjustment, a different quantity entirely — it would not land exactly on the marksheet 3 times out of five. It's the same field. So where it differs, marks were genuinely added after my paper was marked.

Nine marks across five papers. On the aggregate it's the difference between 91.0% and 92.8% — small enough that nobody would notice, large enough to move a cutoff.

There's a smaller adjustment underneath it that I only found by adding the question-wise marks up by hand. On four of the five scripts the individual marks total exactly the figure printed at the top. On Chemistry they come to 51.5 and the script prints 52. Chemistry is also the only paper with an odd number of half-marks — eleven of them, against ten in Physics, four in English and two in Maths, all of which paired up into whole numbers. So a fraction gets rounded up before moderation is applied at all, and Chemistry's real journey is 51.5 → 52 → 59.

Two things follow from this, and they pull in opposite directions. Moderation is real, so a paper that felt like a disaster is probably not the disaster you think it is. And moderation is small, so it will not save a paper you left half-finished. It closes gaps of a few marks, not of twenty.