‘This isn’t my handwriting’: Chaos, trauma as students hit by CBSE’s digital evaluation
Answer sheets that have been swapped, scans that have vanished, answers that have gone unmarked, grievance portal that keeps crashing — India’s largest school board faces mounting outrage over the new On-Screen Marking System as stressed-out students fear technical glitches may wreck their futures.
Thousands of students across India have found themselves trapped this month in a widening crisis triggered by the Central Board of Secondary Education’s new On-Screen Marking system, or OSM. (File) As the 18-year-old student from a private school in Delhi started looking at the scanned copy of her Class 12 chemistry answer sheet, she already suspected something was wrong. She had got 11 out of 70 in theory, a score that she found unbelievable. The first page looked familiar: it had her roll number and her handwriting. But then, the pages changed.
“Every page appeared to be someone else’s writing,” the student, who said she would prefer to remain anonymous, told The Indian Express. “I expected much better marks. The handwriting is not even comparable to mine.”
Thousands of students across India have found themselves trapped this month in a widening crisis triggered by the Central Board of Secondary Education’s new On-Screen Marking system, or OSM, a fully digital evaluation process that was introduced for the Class 12 board examinations this year.
Days after the controversy and confusion began, The Indian Express first reported on Monday (April 25) that a team from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras had visited the headquarters of CBSE to investigate the mounting complaints over the OSM system.
#WATCH | Chennai | Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan says, ” I asked the director of IIT Madras to look into the technical glitch. IIT Kanpur, IIT Chennai, and IIT Madras will look into the technical glitch faced by the CBSE portal. But today it is functioning smoothly. Those who… pic.twitter.com/Ox1axASyxi
— ANI (@ANI) May 24, 2026
The OSM system was intended to modernise India’s largest school examination network. Instead, it has produced confusion and panic: answer sheets uploaded under the wrong roll numbers, missing scanned pages, visible answers left unchecked, and a grievance portal that has repeatedly crashed as students have raced against deadlines.
In Bhopal, 18-year-old Kanishka received a scanned Sanskrit answer booklet that had two pages missing. “CBSE did not scan two whole pages of my Sanskrit answer book. How can someone accidentally skip two pages?” she asked incredulously. And that isn’t all – “In my English paper one whole answer remains unmarked,” she added.
In Delhi, Vedant, a Class 12 student, said the Physics paper uploaded by CBSE did not belong to him at all. “The handwriting style, letter formation, spacing, slant, sentence flow, everything is different,” he wrote online.
“If this is true, then what exactly was evaluated under my roll number? My paper? Or someone else’s?” he asked.
After Vedant’s post went viral, CBSE responded publicly, accepting the mistake and saying that the “correct copy” of the answer sheet had been sent to him, and that action to update his result had been initiated.
But for many educators, the larger concern is this: how many cases like Vedant’s lie undetected, and how many cases never reached social media?
The principal of a private school in southwest Delhi said teachers at her school had begun to notice serious discrepancies while reviewing evaluated geography papers.
“Many answers in the sheets were not evaluated,” the principal said. “Answers that were clearly written, presented, and correctly formatted. [But they were left] simply unmarked.”
Teachers across schools in Delhi, several of whom spoke anonymously, said worried and upset parents had been calling until late at night asking whether the low marks of their wards could be trusted. Several educators told The Indian Express that they were unsure what guidance to offer.
Delhi-based advocate Vineet Jindal said he had been receiving calls from students across the country — from Bihar, Haryana, Chennai, he said — all describing similar problems. “Most of them are affected with low marks… They gave correct answers, but they were not awarded the marks,” Jindal said.
There are other issues too. “The blank sheet has been marked on a page where there is written content,” Jindal said. “Blurred sheets — this is a common issue.”
Jindal said several students were preparing to approach the Delhi High Court if CBSE failed to resolve their complaints in time. However, even at this time of understandable distress, he counselled restraint.
“If you challenge OSM at this particular moment, it will harm the children more,” he said. “Counselling will begin, college admissions will begin, but the poor child’s career may be ruined,” he said.
Many plans have indeed been put in jeopardy. Jindal described a call from a parent in Chennai whose son had secured admission to King’s College London, but he risked losing eligibility for a Singapore university because his CBSE aggregate had dropped below the required cutoff.
“Three percentage points,” Jindal said, “can change everything.”
The CBSE has said complaints are being addressed on “top priority.” The re-evaluation window remains open until June 5.
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