In February 2026, the Central Board of Secondary Education rolled out something it had never attempted at this scale: On-Screen Marking, or OSM, for Class 12 board exams. Physical answer booklets were scanned at CBSE regional offices and uploaded to a centralised portal where evaluators could assess them digitally, with the board saying the system would eliminate manual calculation errors, prevent skipped answers, and speed up results. The board's Controller of Examinations was confident enough to promise results in a nine-day evaluation window instead of the usual twelve.
It did not go as promised.
When Class 12 results landed on 13 May 2026, the fallout was immediate. Students reported blurred scans, missing pages, mismatched answer sheets, unmarked answers, and marks that made no sense. The national pass percentage fell to 85.20 percent the lowest in seven years. Nearly four lakh students applied for scanned copies of their own answer sheets, a number far higher than any previous year itself, a sign of how little trust remained in the new system.
It was not an auditor or a regulator who first exposed the cracks. It was a teenager. A Delhi student named Vedant Srivastava posted on social media that the scanned Physics answer sheet CBSE had shared with him under his own roll number simply wasn't his. The image went viral, and it became the spark that pulled the entire OSM rollout into public scrutiny.
As students dug further, attention turned to who was actually running the marking system. CBSE had struggled to find a bidder for the OSM contract through two rounds, before relaxing key technical requirements around image quality and error penalties and awarding the job to a Hyderabad-based firm called Coempt Edu Teck.
What many students hadn't initially realised was that the name was new, but the company wasn't. In April 2019, at least 20 students in Telangana died by suicide after roughly 40 per cent of test-takers failed an exam whose answer sheets had been digitised by a firm called Globarena Technologies, which later rebranded itself as Coempt Edu Teck and went on to win the CBSE contract.
Coempt has pushed back hard on being tied to that history. The company has denied that software failures or security lapses caused the reported answer-sheet discrepancies, attributing at least some issues to manual errors in scanning rather than a technological flaw. On the 2019 case specifically, the company has said courts examined the matter fully and cleared it of wrongdoing, a finding it says was upheld up to the Supreme Court, and has maintained it has never been blacklisted by any board, university, or government authority under any name.
The most alarming discovery came from a 19-year-old. Nisarga Adhikary, describing himself as a cybersecurity researcher, said the OSM test website contained a hard-coded "master password" that could bypass OTP verification, let someone log into examiner accounts, and even change students' marks.
CBSE's first response was to downplay it. The board said its main evaluation portal had not been breached and that the flaw Adhikary found was limited to a testing platform holding only sample data. That position didn't hold for long. CBSE later acknowledged vulnerabilities across the OnMark portal ecosystem, a shift from its earlier insistence that no security breach had occurred, and said cybersecurity experts from government agencies and the IITs had been brought in to strengthen the system.
The reversal went further still. Weeks after Adhikary's disclosures, CBSE reportedly abandoned reliance on the Coempt-built portal altogether and built its own in-house platform for the Class 12 re-evaluation process, reportedly drawing on inputs from IIT experts and from Adhikary himself.
As the scandal grew, political pressure followed. Student-led disclosures snowballed into broader outrage against the government's handling of the crisis, with mounting calls for Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign.
Pradhan didn't deny the failures. He said he was taking responsibility and promised that "no one will be spared" if irregularities were confirmed in the evaluation process. He also acknowledged that discrepancies had emerged during the system's first large-scale use and said the government was committed to resolving genuine student grievances.
But acknowledgementalready- didn't translate into accountability at the top. The government's response was limited to internal transfers of senior CBSE officials, with no major overhaul of the evaluation system announced and no move against the minister himself. Opposition leaders seized on the gap between words and action. Congress leader Jairam Ramesh argued that Pradhan's continuation in office, after weeks of denial followed by a forced admission of vulnerabilities, was an insult to lakhs of students and their families. Rahul Gandhi separately called the situation a "cover-up" and demanded both the minister's removal and an independent investigation.
Even as the political standoff continued, the everyday cost to students kept mounting. CBSE had been charging students steep fees for scanned copies of their own already-digitised answer sheets, and the verification process itself was plagued by technical glitches, wrongly deducted payments, and payment gateway failures problems the board attributed to unprecedented portal traffic and attempted unauthorised interference. Under pressure, CBSE eventually cut its fees for scanned photocopies from ₹700 to ₹100 per subject, verification fees from ₹500 to ₹100, and re-evaluation fees from ₹100 to ₹25 per question.
There were also allegations that CBSE tried to manage the narrative rather than fix the system. Reports suggested the board circulated a communication toolkit to schools and pressured principals into posting coordinated videos defending OSM, with observers noting near-identical phrasing across many of these posts while students on platforms like Reddit alleged their own schools pressured them to do the same.
Months on, the pattern is hard to miss: nearly every major revelation in this scandal the mismatched answer sheet, the master password, the rebranded vendor's past came from students and independent researchers, not from CBSE's own oversight. The minister said the responsibility was his. The officials who were moved were mid-level. The man at the top of the ministry is still there.
For the roughly 17 lakh households whose children sat these exams, the question left hanging is a simple one: if the people running the system needed teenagers to catch its failures, who exactly was supposed to be watching in the first place?
Sources and References
- 2026 CBSE On-Screen Marking controversy — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org
- How CBSE OSM Turned Board Results Into a National Scandal — The Probe (May 31, 2026) https://theprobe.in
- How India's CBSE exam scandal set off student outrage against PM Modi — Al Jazeera (June 4, 2026) https://www.aljazeera.com
- CBSE Exam Scandal India: Student Outrage Over Digital Crisis — Youth Diplomacy Forum (June 4, 2026) https://youthdiplomacyforum.com
- Coempt denies software lapses in CBSE digital marking controversy — Business Standard (June 18, 2026) https://www.business-standard.com
- Education system under threat? Questions raised over CBSE marking system after glitch found — WION (May 28, 2026) https://www.wionews.com
- CBSE OSM Controversy Explained: Board Admits Security Gaps After On-Screen Marking Portal Hack — Gulf News (May 31, 2026) https://gulfnews.com
- CBSE OSM Row: Pradhan 'Incompetent', Continuation in Office Insult to Lakhs of Students: Cong — Outlook India (June 6, 2026) https://www.outlookindia.com