Controversy and Challenges in CBSE's Digital Evaluation System

The Central Board of Secondary Education. Their first big push at digital evaluation . It’s all come under a serious microscope now, especially after the Class 12 results dropped. There were answer-sheet mix-ups. Scanning problems. Things that had been flagged before now exploded into public visibility.

Government sources told PTI about the mess. They said CBSE spotted about twenty cases. Students saw answer sheets that weren't theirs. This happened because they rolled out that new On-Screen Marking system this year. It’s complicated.

And it wasn't just the sheets. More than thirteen thousand answer sheets actually needed to be checked manually. The scanned copies just didn't cut it for digital assessment standards.

This whole thing really kicked off during the post-result verification phase. Students tried to access those scanned copies through the CBSE portal. And some of them found that the answer sheets uploaded under their names just weren't theirs.

One student, Vedant, brought it up on social media. He claimed the Physics answer sheet they gave him during re-evaluation wasn't actually his. Sanjana reported something similar. These mismatches, they all pointed back to the scanning process. That’s where the trouble started.

After the complaints piled up, the CBSE actually reached out to the students. They gave them the correct answer sheets. A bit slow, maybe, but they did it.

The OSM system itself. It was introduced specifically for the Class 12 exams this year. A massive change.

Under this new setup, everything was supposed to be scanned and checked digitally. They scanned nearly ninety-eight lakh answer booklets. That’s almost forty crore pages, you can imagine.

But the scanning wasn't clean. Officials admitted that about sixty-eight thousand answer sheets had quality issues. They had to be scanned again. More than those thirteen thousand sheets that failed the first scan still needed manual checking.

The controversy bled into the post-result services too. CBSE had to hit the pause button. They postponed the launch of the verification and re-evaluation portal. From May 29th, it got pushed to June 1st.

But the demand for these copies is huge. Reports suggest more than four lakh requests have already landed. People are desperate for those scanned books. Sources are whispering that maybe, next year, answer sheets could even show up on DigiLocker, alongside the mark sheets.

The real deep dive, though, is in the internal reports. There was this observation report. It came from a dry run of the OSM system. It happened in five Delhi schools back in January 2026. The report, submitted on January 21st, was already screaming warnings. It flagged at least thirty-six issues. Technical problems. Operational hiccups. Evaluation flaws. Before they even rolled it out nationally.

What were these concerns? They pointed out risks. Risks of checking things blindly. Superficial checking. Not enough supervision. No real safeguards against data getting lost. And evaluators? They had no real chance to talk about marking or standardize it properly.

And the marking itself. The report noted that evaluators could just drop marks after assigning them, without actually reading the answers fully. That’s a huge thing.

Then there’s the staff. Additional Head Examiners. They reportedly couldn't return scripts when they found errors. They couldn't just look at the answer sheets they wanted for quality checks.

On the technical side, the problems were piling up. Slow performance. No auto-save features. Trying to view the question papers and the marking schemes together was a headache. Hidden student content. Subject codes just looked wrong. And evaluator fatigue. Long answers made everyone tired.

This all feeds into the bigger picture. The project itself got political heat. Rahul Gandhi stepped in. He questioned the contract awarded to Coempt. He brought up their history in Telangana.

The bidding process, they insisted, followed the rules. Coempt and Tata Consultancy Services were the only ones technically qualified in the final round.

The numbers on the contract were interesting. Coempt quoted about twenty-four point seven five rupees per booklet, including taxes. TCS quoted something higher, about sixty-five to sixty-six rupees per booklet before taxes. So, Coempt ended up being the lowest bidder.

Officials kept saying that these kinds of challenges are normal when you launch something this big. But they insisted that technology-based evaluation is the future. That it remains central to how exams are reformed going forward. It’s a complicated mess, really.