Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Thursday admitted “certain discrepancies” and accepted “responsibility” but did not offer any answers on the mess many students who appeared in the Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE’s) Class XII examinations this year find themselves in.
“I myself take responsibility on behalf of the government for any inconvenience and I request everyone that this is not the time for politics,” Pradhan said on Thursday.
“Right now, the most important thing is that the mental stress of these students and examinees should not increase further. We appeal to everyone that no one’s words or behaviour should add to their stress,” the minister said.
Both the minister and the board defended the On Screen Marking system that has led to heartburn among lakhs of students.
After the results were declared on May 13, many students were disappointed with the marks. When some students asked the CBSE to provide them with the answer sheets, they found anomalies in the scanned copies provided to them. It began with a couple of students and has now snowballed into a major row,
This is the first year that the CBSE has introduced the On Screen Marking system for the Class XII school-leaving examination, one of the most important examinations in a student’s career. In the system, scanned copies of answer sheets are evaluated on computer screens.
The system involves scanning of the answer-sheets and uploading them on an online portal for evaluation by teachers. The answer books collected from the exam centres were transported to the regional offices of the board, scanned and uploaded for evaluation by the examiners.
Student after student has complained about blurred answer sheets, missing pages, mismatch in the physical and digital copies of the answer sheets they have been provided when they asked for re-evaluation.
On Wednesday one student wrote on X: “To be precise, the first 15 pages appear to be mine, but 16-20 seem to belong to another student as the handwriting changes completely. I wrote over 28 pages in my English exam, yet I have received only 15 pages of my actual answer sheet.”
Another student, who said they had received 33 out of 80 in one of the papers, wrote on X that the scanned copy of their answer sheet was not in their handwriting and was in black ink, which they said they had not used.
These and scores of similar questions raised on social media have not received any direct response from the authorities yet.
The contract for the digital evaluation platform was given to a Hyderabad-based company, Coempt Edu Teck, in December 2025.
Rahul Gandhi had on Wednesday raised four questions for the Narendra Modi government and the CBSE: “Why was the CBSE OSM contract handed to COEMPT – company already mired in controversy under its old name, Globarena? On whose orders was it done? Why were not background checks done? What is the connection between COEMPT’s management and the Modi government?”
The CEO of Coempt, VSN Raju, did not respond to calls and texts made by The Telegraph Online.
The CBSE had in a statement on Wednesday night denied Rahul’s charges.
The leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha countered: “A denial is not an answer. Why are the education minister and CBSE unable to answer the four simple questions I have asked? The future of 18.5 lakh students have been put in jeopardy. They deserve the truth.”
Minister Pradhan refused to answer the questions raised by Rahul.
“As far as Rahul Gandhi is concerned, he seems to have reached a different state of mind. Due to continuous electoral defeats, he appears frustrated. He opposed SIR [special intensive revision of electoral rolls], he used to oppose EVMs and he opposed Digital India. He does not seem to stand with India’s scientific progress,” the minister said.
Pradhan said that any irregularities found will be severely dealt with.
"In total, there are 98 lakh answer-sheet copies, with each copy consisting of around 40 pages, which means nearly 40 crore scanned pages were evaluated for the first time by CBSE through the OSM process," he said.
Describing the OSM as "progressive and student-centric", the minister said several institutions in India and abroad are adopting such mechanisms for greater transparency in evaluation.
"Through this process, students can transparently access information about their marks, and through scanned copies, they can directly view their answer sheets. It helps address students' doubts and concerns regarding whether they received fewer or more marks, or whether any answer or section was overlooked during evaluation," he said.
"This is the first time CBSE has implemented this system in the country. Certain discrepancies have come to our notice, and I take responsibility for them," the minister said.
"These issues will be rectified, and appropriate solutions will be worked out. All of us are engaged in this task. We will not leave a single student's unanswered query or concern unresolved," he added.
Rahul hits back at Pradhan
"Dharmendra Pradhan ji, you can attack me all you want, but it won't absolve you of your crimes. Nor will it stop me from demanding answers for 18.5 lakh children," Rahul Gandhi wrote in a post on X after Pradhan’s jab.
The Congress leader asserted that if the prime minister truly cared about the situation, he should have dismissed Pradhan long ago for jeopardising the futures of countless students.
In a post on X, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said: "The responsibility for the NEET-CBSE debacles is equally on the Pradhan Mantri, who has protected the Mantri even after the 2024 NTA debacle.”
CBSE: OSM ‘robust’
On Thursday, the CBSE issued a statement addressed to students that the answer books are “safe” and have been processed through “multiple quality-control mechanisms.”
The board said that the OSM system was a “secure and robust IT platform” and no compromise or vulnerability was reported in the actual evaluation portal.
It also claimed that the platform had been “tested and certified through empanelled security audits,” supported by a “robust digital infrastructure” with multiple quality checks and safeguards for secure scanning and processing of answer books.
The declaration on “security” was prompted by an ethical hacker’s claim that one of the OSM testing websites of the CBSE had a “hard-coded master password” that could be used to bypass the OTP verification to log into the examiner’s account and allegedly even tamper with the marks.
The board had rolled out the OSM system to eliminate totaling errors, reduce manual intervention and speed-up evaluation. This year’s results showed the pass percentage had dropped from last year’s 88.39 per cent to 85.29 per cent.
