The Centre on Sunday defended the on-screen marking (OSM) system for evaluating CBSE Class XII students amid a raging debate on whether “hasty” technological intervention contributed to the drop in pass percentage this year.

The pass rate has reduced to 85.2 per cent from 88.39 per cent in 2025. The number of students scoring more than 90 per cent fell from 1.12 lakh in 2025 to 0.94 lakh this year.

Till last year, the papers were being manually assessed at evaluation centres. Under the OSM, the papers are scanned by the board and their PDF versions are sent for evaluation.

School education secretary Sanjay Kumar said the OSM system was being used by international boards and several Indian universities. He said it was a standardised evaluation based on an objective step-wise assessment and helped in eliminating totalling and tabulation errors while leaving no scope for any unassessed answer.

Kumar said 98.66 lakh answer sheets were scanned and converted into PDFs for assessment under OSM. However, scanned copies of about 13,000 answer sheets were not legible and had to be checked manually.

The principal of a school here blamed the drop in pass percentage on the "hasty" introduction of the OSM.

“The OSM was introduced without proper preparation. Teachers are not equipped to handle this technology. The scanned copies of many answer sheets were blurred. Yet the board said that they had to be assessed. It was hurriedly done,” said the principal, who did not wish to be
identified.

CBSE chairperson Rahul Singh said a dry run was held in January, and the OSM was launched after it was found that the system was functioning well.

“The board follows step-wise evaluation. It was the practice when assessments were happening manually. There was no change in the assessment practice under the OSM,” Singh said.

Srinivasan Sriram, principal of The Mann School, told The Telegraph that the decline in pass rate could be attributed to a shift to more competency-based questions and a lack of scope for any sympathetic marking under the OSM system.

“The difficulty level of questions in mathematics and physics was greater this year. So the number of students scoring 100 has fallen significantly. In manual evaluation, there was some scope for consideration. Such a scope is less in the OSM. Also, fatigue due to prolonged screentime may have affected the evaluation to some extent,” Sriram said.

Kumar and Singh on Sunday announced a relaxation in fees charged by the CBSE from students for obtaining answer sheets seeking verification and re-evaluation of answers.