CBSE Chairman, Secretary Transferred As On-Screen Marking Controversy Escalates

New Delhi: The central government has transferred Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) Chairman Rahul Singh and Secretary Himanshu Gupta amid the escalating controversy over the use of On-Screen-Marking (OSM) in Class 12 examination.

A one-member committee has been formed to investigate procurement of OSM services by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). The Committee will be chaired by S. Radha Chauhan, Chairperson of Capacity Building Commission. She is empowered to obtain the assistance of officers from other offices as required.

The Committee will submit its report within a month to the Department of Personnel and Training.

Students Flag Severe Concerns In OSM System

The move by the Centre comes after complaints from students regarding unexpectedly low marks in this year’s board examinations. Many students have linked the issue to the new On-Screen Marking (OSM) system, under which answer sheets are scanned and assessed on-screen instead of being checked physically in most cases.

Several students have complained about blurred scanned copies, missing pages, wrong answer sheets, portal glitches and cybersecurity concerns.

Several students who downloaded copies of their evaluated answer sheets have shared screenshots on social media, claiming that parts of the scans are difficult to read due to poor image quality.

Sharing blurred pictures of answer sheets, a netizen questioned, “A CBSE student's answer sheet looks like THIS and the examiner gave ZERO. Can you even READ what's written? Because apparently the examiner could.”

People have also claimed that marks have been deducted even when students wrote the correct answer. 

Re-Evaluation Portal Launched

Following the concerns raised by students and their parents, CBSE launched a re-evaluation portal on June 2, which will remain live till June 6 midnight.

Students are being charged Rs 100 per answer sheet for verification of issues like missing pages, blurred pages, and the like. Meanwhile, Rs 25 is being charged per question for re-evaluation.

On the first day of the launch of the re-evaluation portal, as many as 1.5 million cyberattack attempts were made within just two minutes. In a post on X, CBSE stated that “malicious actors” attempted to disrupt services through a “barrage of cyberattacks”, addding that there were more than one lakh attempts to access unauthorised files. 

Despite the malicious attempts, the portal is said to be functioning. CBSE said that based on the feedback of the students, the Board has “further refined the platform” and have extended the session time limits to make the process of application for re-evaluation more “convenient and seamless”.