In our country, nearly 46 lakh students were given a masterclass this year — not in physics or mathematics, but in what happens when an institution mistakes ambition for readiness. When the Central Board of Secondary Education declared Class 12 results on May 13, its newly launched On-Screen Marking system (OSM) didn’t just malfunction. It unravelled, publicly and painfully, taking with it something far harder to restore than software: Institutional trust.

OSM was, in concept, a sound idea. Physical answer sheets would be scanned, uploaded to a secure portal, and assessed by teachers remotely, thus cutting travel costs, eliminating totalling errors, and accelerating results. The board’s ambition was real. So was its failure to match that ambition with the preparedness it demanded. What followed the May 13 declaration was a cascade of failures.
Students reported blurred scans rendering handwriting illegible, missing supplementary pages leaving entire answers unmarked, page-level scores that didn’t add up, and, most jaw-dropping, answer sheets that belonged to someone else entirely. Some students who had cleared JEE Mains, one of the country’s most competitive engineering entrance tests, failed their own board examinations. The re-evaluation portal, when finally opened, crashed repeatedly. For a generation that had studied for years toward a result, this was not a technical glitch. It was a betrayal.

The more troubling revelation is that none of this was unforeseeable. Teachers who took part in pre-rollout dry runs told the media the system needed at least another year. The Delhi Government School Teachers’ Association formally urged the board to pause implementation, warning that rolling out a fully digital evaluation framework without structured training posed “significant practical challenges”. Most examiners, the association stated, had not received certified preparation. These were not outsiders raising alarms. They were the board’s own frontline evaluators, speaking from inside the very test exercises CBSE had commissioned to stress the system. Leadership heard them — and proceeded anyway.

Link: https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/cbse-osm-digital-evaluation-failure-investigation-2026-10721775/