A screenshot from ethical hacker’s blog

CBSE’s ambitious shift to digital evaluation for Class 12 board exams has come under scrutiny after answer-sheet mix-ups, scoring discrepancies, and contested security claims triggered a government-ordered IIT audit ahead of key admissions deadlines. 

A team from IIT-M is currently in Delhi to examine the On-Screen Marking (OSM) system, with IIT-M director V. Kamakoti saying the institute would soon have greater clarity on “where things went wrong”.

“There is a requirement for a third-party audit. They are also fighting against time because students need clarity to take the next steps for JEE and other admissions,” Kamakoti said, adding that it was still unclear whether the problems stemmed from a cyber attack or a system unable to handle traffic loads.

Complaints galore

The audit comes amid a flood of complaints from students and parents about CBSE’s first full-scale use of OSM, under which scanned answer sheets are digitally evaluated rather than physical scripts.

Students have reported a range of anomalies, including answer sheets uploaded under the wrong roll numbers, blurred scanned pages, missing supplementary sheets, and scoring discrepancies. In one widely shared case, student Vedant Shrivastava alleged that the Physics answer sheet sent to him by CBSE did not match his handwriting. The Board later acknowledged the error and said the correct copy had been sent and the result corrections, where applicable, were underway.

Delhi-based advocate Vineet Jindal, who said he is advising over 50 affected students, told businessline that complaints range from “missing pages in scanned answer sheets and blurred scans to incorrect evaluation and students being unable to access the re-evaluation portal itself”.

The controversy has widened after ethical hacker Nisarga Adhikary claimed he discovered vulnerabilities in the OSM system, including what he described as a “master password” that could bypass authentication and potentially allow unauthorised access to marks.

No security breach: CBSE

CBSE rejected the claim, saying the URL cited by the hacker was only a testing site with sample data and that “no security breaches have come to light” on the portal used for actual evaluation. Adhikary, however, challenged the Board’s explanation, saying he had screen recordings showing access to production data.

The OSM system is run by Coempt Edu Teck, formerly Globarena Technologies, which faced similar controversy during Telangana’s 2019 intermediate examination debacle. Businessline’s queries to Coempt’s CEO remain unanswered. The digital exercise involved nearly 98 lakh scanned answer sheets for over 18 lakh students, making it one of India’s largest technology-led examination evaluation projects, now under scrutiny over whether the system was ready for the scale. 

Published on May 26, 2026