On June 4th, 2026, students from the Pilani campus received their grades for the previous semester. Within minutes, many had already checked them, and word began to spread. As usual, the release of grades was accompanied by large-scale public discussion. Some students rejoiced, while others bemoaned their poor performance and committed to do better ‘agle sem’. This time, however, the mood was different. Every BITS-related channel was flooded with students voicing their unhappiness over the grades. 

Some background is necessary here. At BITS Goa, as of June 2026, there have been seven suicides over the past eighteen months. This tragedy has prompted serious concerns about the mental health of students. Whether these suicides were a result of academic stress is not established, and this piece does not claim to do so; but the institutional reforms they have precipitated in that sphere are the most visible. 

A recent post on Reddit asserted that the average CGPA at Pilani (until the first semester of 2025-26) was 0.5 points lower than in Goa. While the validity and accuracy of this post cannot be commented on, one thing was for sure — students of the Pilani campus were deeply dissatisfied with the grading system in place. The English Press Club rolled out a survey over the summer break in an attempt to gauge student responses to grading over the past year, and the results were striking. 

Of 511 responses from the  2023-2025 batches, 89.6% rated grading as ‘strict’ or ‘very strict’ — with over half choosing ‘very strict’. Less than 7% called the current grading system ‘just right’. Self-reported stress from grading averaged around 4 out of 5 in every batch, with roughly half of all respondents selecting the maximum. Most evidently, when asked what should change, 65% called for reforms, with 40.7% wanting a rehaul of the grading process such that it is near-identical across all campuses and 24.3% calling for campus-specific CGPA normalisation.  

The Practice School system is an infamous aspect of the BITSian framework. It is consistently held as a central ‘flagship program’ that provides students with industry exposure. PS-II internships are often converted to job offers, particularly for dualites doing double PS. The allocation system is centralised; it does not distinguish among students across campuses. When students from the batch of 2023 were asked about how they thought this disparity would affect their placements/PS-II allocations, 46% rated this as high impact (a score of 4 or 5 out of 5). 

Viewed this way, the absence of standardised grading across the campuses has real-world consequences for its students. Placements and internships have a fixed CGPA threshold across all three campuses. A common consensus amongst students is that the BITS grading system is more strict even in comparison to IITs and other top engineering institutions across the country. Deflated CGPAs may also weigh against those applying for master’s programmes where a good CGPA is an important criterion. This is despite Pilani campus students entering with among the strongest BITSAT scores, often having chosen this campus at the expense of more lucrative options elsewhere. 

The arbitrariness of grading compounds this, with students pointing out the lack of transparency. Grade distribution and cutoffs are never released, new courses offer no precedent on how grading will be, and grade ranges may be arbitrarily huge or tiny depending upon a course. An example of this is the course Understanding Self and Society, a new 2-credit common course offered only to the ‘25 batch. Freshmen students were frustrated with the course’s grading, which, despite high averages, saw a C even at a score of nearly 150/200. Similar frustrations abounded across batches about a variety of courses.

The survey shows a consensus in favour of the following reforms:

• A rehaul of the grading system such that it is fair across all three campuses, with an average at B- or B. The rehaul must produce a system with transparent and fair grading, such that there is no variation based on IC or department. Many called for a percentile or rank-based grading system with pre-allocated quotas for each grade. 
• Transparency in marks display, such that grade distribution and thresholds are publicly released.
• An increase in the amount of A-’s and B-’s awarded as they account for a full grade point. 
• Failing any reform, at minimum, a normalisation of CGPA in all centralised programmes on a campus-specific basis, as has been discussed in recent Senate meetings.

Across three batches and over five hundred responses, students of the Pilani campus hold a near-unanimous opinion that the current grading system is too opaque, too strict, and too inconsistent. What they are asking for is not leniency, but fairness in grading that is more transparent, predictable, and equitable across the three campuses that share a common pool for PS, internships, and placements.