Even more admission nonsense

This follows from More Admission Nonsense (http://directindia.blogspot.com/2008/08/more-admission-nonsense.html). Apparently, the normalisation math goes thus: 'The average of the top 10 scores in a particular board is calculated; the scores of a student from the same board is then divided by this average; the number is then multiplied by 100 to arrive at the student's normalised score.'

At least that's what yesterday's (26 Aug 08) Times of India says.

If there is any logic to this, it escapes me.

The top students of any board score almost full marks these days. So the whole exercise effectively becomes multiplying a student's score by 0.99987 or some figure very close to 1. 

Anyway, since when did these outliers become representative of a board? Shouldn't they be looking at the median, mean or mode, or some such central measure? Why don't they simply ask boards to give all their marks, whereupon one call easily calculate each student's percentile (with a OTS software)? What do other boards do?