Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) will rectify discrepancies found in its new digital evaluation system.
This admission follows the first-ever implementation of On-Screen Marking (OSM) for Class 12 answer sheets. Because these exams determine university admissions and career paths for millions, any technical error in grading can have significant consequences for student futures.
During a review meeting in New Delhi on May 28, 2024, Pradhan said he took responsibility for the issues that surfaced during the digital process. He said the government would ensure transparency and that "no student will suffer" [1].
The scale of the digital transition was vast. Approximately 17 lakh students appeared for the Class 12 exam [2]. The board processed about 40 crore scanned pages [3] to evaluate around 98 lakh answer-sheet copies digitally [3].
Pradhan said the OSM system was designed to allow students to transparently access their marks and view scanned copies of their answer sheets directly [4]. However, the emergence of discrepancies prompted the government to bring in external technical expertise to audit the system. Expert teams from IIT Kanpur and IIT Madras were roped in to review the OSM process [5].
Pradhan said he "will not leave a single student's concern unresolved" [6]. The minister said the goal remains a student-centric approach where technical lapses are corrected without penalizing the examinees.
Officials are now focusing on identifying the specific nature of the discrepancies to determine if they were systemic software glitches or human errors during the digital marking phase. The review by the Indian Institutes of Technology is expected to provide a framework for the necessary corrections.
“"No student will suffer."”
The shift to On-Screen Marking represents a massive digital transformation for India's education infrastructure. While intended to increase transparency and speed, the reported discrepancies highlight the risks of scaling unproven technology across millions of high-stakes documents. The involvement of IIT Kanpur and IIT Madras suggests the government views this as a technical failure requiring academic rigor to resolve, rather than a simple administrative error.
