It has been learnt that despite repeated warnings by the board itself about piloting its new system first in certain regions before introducing its highly-debated new online marking system (OSM) for the current class 12 exams, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has turned a deaf ear to such recommendations. According to internal minutes of the meeting held in June 2025, board members had actually advised piloting the system in selected disciplines before the full-scale implementation in all subjects. However, the board ignored such advice and carried out a mere two-day experiment in January involving just 100 teachers in five Delhi-based schools.
Even during that limited trial, participating educators had urged officials to pause the rollout, warning that the software required at least two years of training and substantial refinement. Ignoring the feedback, CBSE officially announced the nationwide implementation of OSM on February 9, a mere week before the high-stakes Class 12 exams commenced on February 17. Principals and examiners have since dismissed the subsequent explanatory webinars and mock sessions as token formalities rather than the robust training required for such a fundamental shift in grading practices. When actual evaluation began on March 7, thousands of teachers were effectively forced to learn how to navigate the alien software whilst marking live scripts.
The system has now triggered widespread panic and anger. Evaluators report that screen-based marking lacks the flexibility of physical grading, making it incredibly easy to overlook steps in complex equations or miss text written in corners. The examiners were also under tremendous stress to achieve daily targets to get prompt results, with many saying that speed was given more importance than careful reading. The entire process of going digital is also marked by various technical snags, such as system overloads and poor scanning. Among the total of 9.8 million answer scripts, more than 68,000 have been fully re-submitted because the images could not be read properly, while more than 13,000 scripts had to be manually verified due to poor scanning.
The entire fiasco is bound to have severely dented the students' morale, something evident from the rise in the number of complaints filed post-results. By May 26, CBSE had received over 404,000 applications demanding scanned copies of more than 1.1 million answer books— a monumental 208 per cent jump in applicants compared to last year. Whilst the board claims this surge is simply due to a recent fee reduction from ₹700 to ₹100 per subject, families and school principals argue it stems from genuine anxiety over erratic grading, especially after the overall Class 12 pass percentage fell by over three percentage points to 85.20 per cent, the lowest mark recorded since 2019.
Fears of systemic mix-ups have been compounded by high-profile blunders. In one widely reported incident, a student named Vedant Shrivastava discovered that the physics answer sheet uploaded under his roll number belonged to an entirely different person. CBSE eventually rectified the error, admitting it was a rare mix-up likely caused when the script was pulled out for manual evaluation after a scanning failure. Meanwhile, with the board's official re-evaluation portal set to open on May 29, many anxious students are still waiting in limbo, complaining that they have only received a fraction of the digital scripts they requested days ago.
Despite the current backlash and memories of a failed 2014 pilot that was shelved due to poor connectivity, CBSE officials have dug their heels in, confirming during a press conference that the on-screen marking system will remain in place for next year’s examinations. Commenting on the crisis, former CBSE chairperson Ashok Ganguly remarked that whilst digital marking is a commendable step forward, the board was clearly underprepared, emphasising that the credibility of the entire board exam process relies on high-quality scanning, comprehensive teacher retraining, and the revival of older, robust checks like the outlier mechanism to catch anomalies.
Also read: CBSE denies claims, says viral URL a test portal
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