The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has come under scrutiny once again after 20 cases of answer sheet mix-ups were discovered in the On-Screen Marking (OSM) system, introduced this year. Nearly 13,000 copies were evaluated manually after the digital assessments failed to provide results.

How Did The Discrepancies Come To Light?

The glitch came to light after students flagged discrepancies. Some candidates on social media alleged that their answer scripts were uploaded against the names of other students.

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Among the affected students, Vedant, a Class 12 student, flagged the issue. He said that the physics answer sheet uploaded in the portal was not his. Another student reported the same issue.

Following this, it was discovered that the mismatches occurred during the scanning process. The CBSE then contacted the students and provided the correct answer sheets.

Several Discrepancies Discovered

This year, under the OSM model, answer sheets were scanned and evaluated digitally. According to sources, more than 98 lakh answer booklets, amounting to nearly 40 crore pages, were scanned during the process. Officials said around 68,000 answer sheets were found to have scanning-quality issues and had to be scanned again.

After rescanning, 13,000 copies still failed to meet the required standards. The papers were then checked manually.

The board has now postponed the launch of its Class 12 verification and re-evaluation portal from May 29 to June 1. The board expects a large number of applications, with reports suggesting more than four lakh requests had already been received for scanned copies of answer books. Reports said that answer scripts are expected to be made available through DigiLocker from 2027 alongside mark sheets.

The controversy gained widespread attention as an earlier report revealed that a dry run in five Delhi schools showed at least 36 technical, operational, and evaluation-related concerns before the system was implemented nationally.

Discrepancies included “blind or superficial checking," limited supervisory oversight, lack of safeguards against data loss, and the absence of opportunities for evaluators to discuss or standardise marking. The report further revealed that evaluators awarded marks to the students without checking the entire answer.

Additional Head Examiners were unable to return scripts for correction when errors were detected and could not freely review answer sheets of their choice for quality checks.

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Among the technical concerns are issues such as slow performance, lack of auto-save features, difficulty viewing question papers and marking schemes together, hidden student content, subject-code inconsistencies, and evaluator fatigue caused by long answers.

Role Of Coempt In Spotlight

Reports say the bidding process followed established procedures. They said Coempt and Tata Consultancy Services were the two technically qualified bidders in the final round.

Coempt quoted approximately Rs 24.75 per answer booklet, including taxes, while TCS quoted around Rs 65-66 per booklet before taxes, making Coempt the lowest bidder, News 18 reported.