CBSE On-Screen Marking System and Evaluation Discrepancies

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Following the release of the Class 12 board examination results, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) is facing intense public backlash over massive discrepancies in its newly implemented On-Screen Marking (OSM) system.

On-Screen Marking (OSM) is a digital evaluation framework for handwritten examination papers instead of physical answer scripts being graded manually with a red pen.
Booklets are collected at centers, scanned, anonymized, and uploaded onto a secure cloud platform where evaluators grade them digitally on computer screens.

The digital evaluation infrastructure and the OnMark portal used by the CBSE were outsourced to Coempt Eduteck Pvt. Ltd.

The CBSE first piloted an early version of OSM in 2013-14, which failed due to a lack of digital literacy and infrastructure.
Despite its own governing body advising in June 2025 to limit OSM to small-volume subjects as a trial run, the CBSE bypassed the pilot phase and enforced full-scale nationwide adoption across all subjects in 2026.

The CBSE introduced full-scale OSM to modernize its evaluation pipeline.
The stated objectives included complete elimination of manual totaling and tabulation errors.
Another goal was accelerated evaluation cycles to compress the processing window from 12 days down to 9 days.
It also aimed for enhanced transparency and reduction of post-result verification applications.

Student roll numbers and barcode identifiers are digitally masked before uploading to prevent examiner bias under anonymization.
Evaluators log into a monitored portal under video surveillance, using digital tools to add ticks, cross out answers, and assign step-wise marks on screen.
The software automatically aggregates question-wise scores into a final tally, preventing manual arithmetic errors.
The system features a strict Service Level Agreement penalizing software downtime or page-loading lags at a rate of ₹1 lakh per 15 minutes.