CBSE Answer Sheet Complaints and Grading Discrepancies

Photocopies of those Class 12 CBSE answer sheets that students got for re-evaluation are showing something pretty serious. Physics is clearly taking the brunt of the complaints. It’s just the subject where the most gripes are coming up.

People are seriously bothered about how the On-Screen Marking system worked. Missing marks, that’s one thing. But there’s more—the checking felt incredibly strict. Students keep talking about not getting credit for correct steps taken during problem-solving. Or worse, they mentioned outright wrong answer sheets were uploaded in some instances. It feels like a whole mess behind the scenes with how these things got graded.

A lot of students claimed they answered everything right and nailed the numerical problems. Yet, they got hardly any marks, or sometimes none at all. This pushed them to apply for that re-evaluation process. They felt completely let down by the results they saw initially.

And it wasn’t just about the scores missing out. There were these deeper issues creeping in. People pointed out inconsistencies in handwriting. Presentation mattered, apparently. The style of writing itself seemed thrown into question by some. Plus, a few students actually complained about pages being missing—scanned sheets or supplementary materials vanished from their Physics papers.

Then there’s the specific case that really sticks with you. Think about Vedant. A student named him alleged that the Physics sheet sent back by CBSE under his name wasn't even his handwriting. He said it absolutely did not have the questions he actually attempted. It was a total mismatch. Not just him, no, his family, teachers—anyone who knows his writing noticed the difference immediately. So, what did they do? They contacted him on X, microblogging site, and asked for the real paper to be handed over in person. That kind of discrepancy is just infuriating.

It seems like this isn't an isolated incident either. We saw another complaint where someone spotted a tiny error—a small letter that seemed marked incorrectly. Even though many users felt the final answer looked right, these little mistakes pile up and cause huge headaches when you’re trying to verify everything. It makes you wonder about the entire checking mechanism.

CBSE itself has acknowledged some of this problem. They admitted there were around twenty cases where answer sheets didn't match up during the evaluation phase. That kind of admission suggests a systemic issue, not just a few rogue errors. They said nearly ninety-eight lakh answer books went through the process. And they admitted mistakes happen, whether it was done manually or digitally. It’s that scale which makes things feel so overwhelming.

And when you look at the actual grades now? Things got really tricky with scoring high marks in science subjects. The cutoffs are shifting around. For Mathematics, for instance, the A1 grade now requires eighty-five marks. That’s a drop from eighty-six last year and even lower than eighty-eight back in twenty-24.

Physics is also seeing adjustments. The A1 cutoff has slipped down to seventy-nine marks. It was eighty-two last year, and then it became eighty-four in twenty-24. Chemistry’s threshold for A1 is now eighty-seven—compared to eighty-nine back in twenty-25 and ninety-two in twenty-24. Biology, thankfully, seems to be the outlier; that one grade level stays put at ninety-one marks.

So you see this unevenness. It's not just about who got what score. It’s about how those scores are calculated. Students felt that applying for application-based papers didn't actually reward solid reasoning or correct methodologies enough. They expected the checking process to value the method as much as the final result.

The complaints weren't all centered on marks, though. Mathematics brought up a second wave of issues. It turned out students were also arguing about intermediate steps. They felt those lengthy solutions didn’t get the weight they deserved. Fewer marks for complex derivations or the necessary working seemed to be the complaint here.

Chemistry complaints focused more specifically on marking schemes. Students argued that if their answer matched the intended structure, why did they lose marks? Why did answers matching the scheme get penalized instead of rewarded? It was about fairness in application of the rules.

Biology saw fewer direct disputes over scores compared to the others, but even there, some students felt that detailed explanations—the diagrams, the labels, all the necessary deep dives—weren't fully recognized or awarded adequately by the evaluators.

It’s this whole picture you get when you look at what happened during evaluation. There was a huge gap between what students expected from an assessment and what they actually received back. They wanted something based on genuine understanding and correct application of concepts, not just mechanical checking. That expectation didn't seem to align with the system as it operated.

The re-evaluation window finally closed, Sunday, June 7th. The IIT panel did give their nod for reassessing those CBSE papers. But even that doesn't erase the frustration built up over these months of uncertainty and alleged errors. It just marks an end to one phase of a very messy story.