CBSE On-Screen Marking System: Scrutiny, Failures, and Security Concerns

CBSE’s whole on-screen marking thing, that big digital shift they promised as a massive transformation in school exams, is now under a brutal microscope.

There’s been intense scrutiny. Questions swirling about whether early warnings about technical glitches and operational nightmares were just swept under the rug before they rolled it out for the Class 12 board exams.

Students across the country started reporting messed-up evaluations. Discrepancies everywhere. And now, that public interest petition is actually at the Delhi High Court. They’re asking for an inquiry into all the alleged irregularities, the technical failures, and how they handled complaints about the system.

Things escalated fast. On Tuesday evening, the government actually moved on the leadership. They removed the CBSE chairman, Rahul Singh, and the board secretary, Himanshu Gupta, and set up an inquiry committee. It’s all tied back to that whole OSM mess.

The worries about the OSM system weren't new, though. Back in January, during a pilot exercise, the Board itself flagged multiple concerns. They reportedly recommended waiting at least a year for more testing and fixes before actually implementing it fully.

So, what exactly was this system? It replaced the old way of marking physical answer booklets. Now, evaluators just looked at scanned copies through this online platform. It was run by a Hyderabad company, Coempt EduTeck .

Those pilot participants pointed out the obvious stuff. The whole thing hinged on having perfect evaluation centers, super-trained markers, and tons of prep work. They worried that technical glitches would just hang around, and that it needed more time to actually make the system reliable.

The trial itself happened over three days in Delhi, mid-January. That was less than a month before the actual Class 12 exams started on February 17th.

Five schools got involved in that trial. Private ones, Delhi government schools, Kendriya Vidyalayas, Navodaya Vidyalayas. Principals, examiners, everyone got trained on the platform before they started marking mock papers.

But the reports coming out of that trial? They were messy. A ton of issues came up regarding marking schemes, calculations, and how the tech actually performed. Sources said some problems flagged on the first day just weren't fixed by the third day.

Evaluators complained about weird stuff. One time, marks got messed up. An Additional Head Examiner got an extra 1.5 points added, but the system showed it as a deduction of 1.5 marks.

There were huge mismatches too. Official CBSE marking schemes didn't line up with what the screen showed. Some papers only reflected marks for one small part of a question, even when multiple parts carried weight.

And the evaluators found things that felt totally wrong. They noted the system sometimes forced them to assign 0.5 marks even when the official rules didn't allow that kind of partial marking. Plus, the platform kept freezing, especially when people tried to use the "Undo" button.

Other complaints were just missing marks from the interface. Failure to save progress automatically. And the ability to just click on question numbers and award marks to blank pages or unanswered questions. It felt totally arbitrary.

These same problems later exploded when students got their results on May 13th.

Students who got their answer scripts back claimed things were totally inconsistent. Some answers looked like they were left unchecked, or only partially checked. Others worried their scanned sheets were blurry or mismatched, leading to the fear they might have been marked on stuff they never actually wrote.

Before the resignations happened, the chairman and secretary were asked for comments about the feedback they got during the dry run. Silence. No response came back.

Minutes from a CBSE Governing Body meeting in June 2025 actually suggested they shouldn't implement on-screen marking until those pilot projects were finished across different regions and subjects. That advice just sat there. It wasn't followed.

Instead, they just ran that small trial with five schools in Delhi.

After all the allegations started flying around, CBSE finally dropped a document, "Know About On Screen Marking," trying to explain what they did after the trial. They said the schools and teachers from all those different types of schools participated and gave recommendations.

They claimed the three days gave them a blueprint for changes. They introduced things like a "Save" option, simplified how marks could be deleted, fixed static IP issues, and repositioned marks that were hiding the students' actual writing. They even introduced color coding for Head Examiners and evaluators, linking the marking scheme directly to the answer books.

But the feedback from the participants was still heavy. A second report they submitted highlighted at least 36 different technical, operational, and evaluation concerns.

Warnings were there about the risk of "blind or superficial checking." People felt the platform didn't let evaluators actually talk or reach a common understanding while assigning marks. There was no way for Additional Head Examiners to return scripts for re-evaluation if multiple mistakes were spotted before the final submission.

Meanwhile, CERT-In , the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, had been sending warnings to CBSE months before this whole drama exploded. They flagged serious security holes in the OnMark portal. CERT-In issued four separate alerts—one back in February 2026 and three more in May 2026—after checking security flaws across three different parts of the system.

The whole platform, built by Coempt EduTeck and running on AWS infrastructure, was used for nearly a crore Class 12 answer sheets this year. But when CERT-In did that emergency security check, they basically concluded that one of the portals "was not fit for deployment in a production environment." That just screamed about readiness for live operation.

Then came the big leak. On May 25th, a 19-year-old ethical hacker named Nisarga Adhikary publicly exposed alleged SQL injection vulnerabilities. He claimed these flaws could give anyone full access—create, read, update, delete—to the production servers. He even alleged access to examiner functions.

CBSE initially brushed it off, saying the claims were misleading. But they later admitted the vulnerabilities on May 31st and thanked the hackers for pointing out the weaknesses.

This all brings the focus back to the company, Coempt EduTeck . They built the system. They were formerly Globarena Technologies . They’ve dealt with some huge examination messes before, like that 2019 Telangana Intermediate results crisis that caused a massive uproar nationwide.

They’ve done projects for various state bodies before, Telangana, Karnataka, Odisha. They claimed decades of experience, industry recognition. Now, after this CBSE row, people are looking at their technology, their security, and their whole evaluation setup with a fresh set of suspicion.

Those early warnings, the ones about the system not being ready, they are now the centre of everything. It just makes you wonder how much weight those initial concerns actually carried before the final implementation went live.