The ongoing controversy surrounding the Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE) new On-Screen Marking (OSM) system has escalated into a legal battle. The National Students’ Union of India (NSUI) moved the Delhi High Court today, filing a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) that alleges widespread technical glitches and serious irregularities in the evaluation of Class 12 board exam papers.
The student body is seeking an urgent independent inquiry into the digital marking process, which has left thousands of students across the country in deep distress over unexpectedly poor results. The legal move comes just days after intense student protests broke out in the national capital. On Saturday, May 30, a large crowd of student activists and distraught parents, led by NSUI National President Vinod Jakhar, staged a demonstration outside the CBSE headquarters in Patparganj, East Delhi. Protesters raised slogans against the board, accusing it of playing with the futures of young students.
“Thousands of students across the country are suffering because of a careless and insensitive evaluation system,” Jakhar said during the protest. “The OSM process has created confusion, injustice, and distrust among students.”
With the board failing to provide a satisfactory resolution, the student outfit decided to take the matter to court. The petition filed by Jakhar through advocates Rishav Ranjan, Ajay Chhikara, and Omar Hoda argues that Class 12 marks are incredibly critical because they directly dictate university admissions, professional courses, and scholarships. Any error at this stage could ruin a student’s entire academic career.
To upgrade its traditional evaluation process, CBSE introduced the digital On-Screen Marking system for the 2025-26 academic session. Under this system, physical answer books are scanned, uploaded to a secure digital portal, and then evaluated on-screen by teachers. According to a parallel petition filed in the Allahabad High Court by advocate Mohit Ashok, CBSE abruptly implemented this massive shift while the exams were already underway, issuing a circular on February 9, followed by brief mock training sessions later that month.
According to several representations made by educators and IT experts cited in the petitions, the transition from physical papers to digital screens was severely flawed from the start. High speed scanners used at various regional evaluation centers reportedly produced heavily pixelated or blurred images of the written scripts. In thousands of instances, examiners were forced to grade pages where the ink was rendered entirely illegible by the digital compression, leading to arbitrary marking.
Furthermore, severe synchronization issues on the central server resulted in incomplete digital uploads. Entire sections of answer scripts, particularly pages containing multi-step equations, mathematical derivations, or detailed scientific diagrams, simply failed to attach to the digital profile of the student, leaving substantial portions of the exam completely unchecked. Beyond the scanning failures, a more alarming structural flaw emerged regarding data integrity. The legal pleas point toward deep flaws in the digital parsing software used to link scanned answer booklets with unique student roll numbers.
Parents and independent student groups have alleged that the automated system mismatched several scripts during the batch-upload phase. As a result, scores were inadvertently swapped or incorrectly assigned, leading to a catastrophic and inexplicable drop in marks for students who had consistently performed at the top of their classes throughout the academic year.
The current grievance mechanism, critics argue, provides no immediate digital transparency to cross-verify these backend parsing errors without undergoing an expensive and prolonged legal appeal. The widespread nature of these evaluation errors is not merely anecdotal it is strongly reflected in the overall performance statistics of this year’s board cycle. In a parallel petition filed before the Allahabad High Court, advocates brought forward stark statistical anomalies that hint at systemic deflation.
The plea highlights an unprecedented collapse in the high-score brackets, noting that only a meager 5.3% of the total student cohort managed to cross the 90% threshold this year a sharp, statistically unnatural decline from previous academic sessions. The data indicates that the science stream bore the absolute brunt of this marking anomaly, with average scores in core subjects like Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics dropping to historic lows across multiple regions.
The real-world tragedy of this evaluation crisis is best illustrated by the deep disconnect between the board results and national competitive examinations. A significant number of affected students are those who have already proved their academic merit by cracking highly rigorous, nationwide entrance tests.
The petitions draw attention to numerous cases where students who cleared the cutoffs for elite engineering and medical programs such as securing high percentiles in the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Main found themselves declared “failed” or relegated to single-digit scores in their school board papers. Because premier institutes require students to meet a baseline percentage criteria in their Class 12 exams to secure admission, these sudden and highly questionable board failures have put the hard-earned futures of hundreds of meritorious students at immediate risk.
As public anger mounted, CBSE officials acknowledged the technical vulnerabilities. The board has initiated steps to penalize its Hyderabad-based technology vendor, Coempt Edu Teck, which was awarded the five-crore contract in December 2025.
According to internal sources, the vendor faces heavy financial penalties under the service agreement, including a fine of ₹1 lakh for every 15 minutes of delay in rectifying technical issues. Board officials confirmed that the glitches also pointed to a data breach involving student information. However, due to a clause modification made in September 2025, CBSE cannot completely blacklist the firm for these lapses, leaving contract termination or security deposit forfeiture as the only extreme options.
The Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed in the Delhi High Court places the breakdown of the digital infrastructure at the center of its legal challenge, demanding immediate judicial intervention. Chief among the prayers is a directive for a thorough, high-level investigation overseen directly by the Central Government.
