By TRH Op-Ed Desk
CBSE launched a digital marking system for Class 12 — without full training, without complete infrastructure, without error free readiness. Wrong answer sheets. Crashed portals. Students in depression. Two fought back on social media and won. How many didn’t know they could?
New Delhi, May 26, 2026 — CBSE has finally conceded what two students spent days trying to prove: that the answer sheets provided to them under the re-evaluation process were wrong — mismatched. The Ministry of Education’s Joint Secretary sent an email confirming that an incorrect answer sheet had been provided and that evaluation of the correct answer sheet was now underway.
What happened to Vedant happened to Sanjana too. In both cases, students came forward on social media, presented handwriting evidence, and proved that the answer sheets being attributed to them were not theirs. The handwriting did not match. Someone else’s answers had been entered against their roll numbers.
For three full days, the government and CBSE denied it. Then they were forced to yield — and to accept that the answer sheet mismatch was real.
The system at the centre of the storm
The controversy, as Manish Anand, a senior journalist and host of The Raisina Hills YouTube channel, made clear in a special episode, goes far beyond two students. The issue is the On-Screen Marking system — OSM — that CBSE introduced this year for Class 12 board evaluation.
“The allegation, and what the facts are beginning to confirm, is that CBSE implemented this new system without any preparation,” Anand said. “No full-proof infrastructure was created. No staff was trained for error free evanulation. And yet the system was rolled out. The result: some students had another student’s answer sheet marked against their account. Others had their papers seemingly never checked at all — and marks were awarded anyway,” he added.
The intent behind OSM was transparency — to allow students to access their scanned answer sheets digitally. The reality has been the opposite: blurry scans, missing pages, mismatched booklets, and a re-evaluation portal that repeatedly crashed and refused payments, leaving students unable to even file challenges.
After the results: a week of anguish
Anand described the week since Class 12 results were declared as one of extraordinary and avoidable suffering for students across the country.
“These are children who sacrificed sleep to study — who gave everything to secure their future,” he said. “And in the one week since results were declared, they have been put through unimaginable stress and tension. This is not a minor inconvenience. This is a great injustice visited upon them.”
The Education Minister is now in talks with banks about payment glitches on the portal. He is speaking with IIT Madras about resolving technical failures in the OSM system. But — as Anand pointedly observed — all of this is happening after the results were already announced.
“You declared the Class 12 board results. And only after that did you go to technical experts to fix the system. That alone tells you everything about how seriously this government and this board treated our students,” said Anand.
The students who never knew to fight back
The most painful dimension of this crisis, Anand argued, is not the students who challenged their results — but those who did not.
“Vedant and Sanjana got their answer. They came forward with proof. They showed the handwriting didn’t match. The system was eventually forced to acknowledge them,” he said. “But what about the children who accepted their marks? Who were satisfied — or who simply didn’t know they could question? What about the students who have quietly slipped into depression because their marks were lower than expected — and who never knew that perhaps someone else’s answer sheet was evaluated in their name?”
The attack on Vedant — including being labelled Pakistani by a journalist — was flagged by Anand as a deliberate attempt to discredit a legitimate grievance using a manufactured narrative. In the end, the student prevailed. The system was made to concede.
A system-wide reckoning is needed
Anand called for a full physical re-evaluation of all Class 12 answer sheets and a fresh declaration of results.
“If CBSE had run even a parallel physical evaluation alongside the digital one — even for the first two or three years of OSM rollout — and averaged the marks from both, this crisis would never have happened. The complaints would not be on social media. The children would not be suffering,” he said.
The demand from students — Justice for Class 12 — is, in Anand’s words, “completely legitimate.”
He placed the scandal in a broader context of institutional decay: NEET examinations cancelled, papers leaked, the National Testing Agency running on three-quarters outsourced staff with no deep commitment to exam integrity. “The state of India’s education system, seen as a whole, is deeply distressing,” he said. “And at the heart of it is a failure of accountability — at CBSE, and at the Ministry of Education.”
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