CBSE's shift to on-screen marking for the 2026 board examinations came with little lead time. Teachers received the first circular on 9 February 2026, attended a webinar on the 13th, and got a second circular the following day. A week-long dry run began on the 16th, followed by a mass mock evaluation on 24th February. In practice, that left evaluators less than a month to get comfortable with an entirely new way of working before the real thing began. We produce here a tabulation of the OSM timeline.
The initial reaction from teachers was largely one of scepticism and unease. A major source of discomfort was regarding the monitoring built into the system — login and logout times were tracked, which many felt signalled distrust rather than support. There was also a sense that something important was being lost: the ability to discuss a difficult paper with a colleague, to revisit a script you weren't sure about, to bring professional judgement to bear on a borderline case…. On-screen marking, as implemented, did not allow for any of these nuanced or collegial actions.
"You know you are being watched, so you just tend to be extra cautious — to justify every step. But there is no scope for discussion."
-A Teacher- Evaluator (identity kept anonymous)
Then there was the scanning. With nearly 17.7 lakh students across five subjects and each answer copy running to an average of 32 pages (48 for Maths), the total volume of pages to be scanned ran into tens of crores. At that scale, quality control over the scanning process was always going to matter enormously — and by most accounts, it proved inadequate.
The table below provides a snapshot of the statistical scale of the exercise.
There were reports about evaluation centres where around 100 scripts had to be rejected because of poor image quality, and dozens were set aside due to issues about mismatched regions or incorrect serial numbers. Some of those rejected scripts were later re-submitted without being re-scanned, and evaluators were told to mark them anyway despite the same defects persisting. Pages were missing from several scanned copies. Handwriting which might have been legible on paper came out blurred or skewed on screen. Teachers had no information about who had done the scanning, where it had taken place, or under what conditions — making it impossible to flag the right problems to the right people.
"It is easier to blame people at the lowest rung, but these issues need to be looked at from the top."
-A Teacher- Evaluator (identity kept anonymous)
The digital platform itself added further friction. One-time passwords for logging in could take several minutes to arrive. The server crashed during evaluation sessions, and teachers learned quickly to save their work frequently if they wanted to spare themselves the onerous task of going on a wild goose chase and retracing the task carried out till then. If an annotation was not saved in time and the session disconnected, the work was gone, and recovering a previously saved copy was a trial-and-error process that not everyone figured out easily. When a script moved from the evaluator to the Additional Head Examiner to the Head Examiner, its identifying code changed — making it cumbersome to locate and review if questions arose later.
There was also a timing problem at the very start: many evaluators arrived expecting to find mock answer scripts online for the first day of practice, only to be told that they were being distributed offline. Nothing was received until around 1:00 PM, and the confusion cost the day. So much for the claims of efficiency.
Evaluators drew comparisons to the shift to online teaching during the pandemic — but noted a key difference. That transition, difficult as it was, happened over weeks with some space to adapt. The OSM rollout gave teachers neither time nor room to adjust and maneuver. The result was nervousness, exhaustion, and a tendency to be more conservative in marking than they might otherwise have been — precisely because they knew that every decision could be scrutinised later but could not be discussed in the moment it was to be taken.
Perhaps most telling was the scheduling: some evaluators were still marking answer scripts just one day before results were declared. This last-minute breathlessness and rush is unprecedented in CBSE’s history. It potrays sheer incompetence, unconcern for teachers’ working conditions and students’ well-being, and lack of planning at the highest levels. It is hard to reconcile this timeline with any serious claim about the thoroughness or reliability of the evaluation.
What CBSE Said — and What Happened
CBSE offered ten reasons for making the switch. Only a couple or so hold up to scrutiny. The elimination of totalling errors through automation could be a genuine improvement — few would argue with that. (Though there were mechanisms available and in use to ensure error-free totalling even before and without adopting the sledgehammer of OSM for the nail of simple addition. For one, CBSE has weakened even this claim by not making any data public about the totalling errors from previous years, on the assumption that people should take it for its words and, gullibly, accept such ‘obvious’ advantages of technology.) But several of the other claims have not borne true.
CBSE said OSM would mean faster evaluation and broader teacher participation. In 2025, evaluation of English scripts began 14 days after the exam. This year, the gap increased to 23 days. Teachers did not experience the process as faster or more efficiently than before — they experienced it as rushed towards the end, with less time to do the work carefully. The Board also said that teachers would be able to remain in their schools and continue regular duties. In practice, they still had to report to designated evaluation centres, so the nature of the disruption changed more than its extent.
The claim that post-result verification would no longer be needed has proven the most visibly incorrect. The re-evaluation requests that have followed the 2026 results suggest the opposite — and it is not difficult to see why. When evaluators are working on illegible scans, under the pressure of keeping a tight and last-minute time schedule, without the scope to consult colleagues, and on a platform prone to technical disruptions, the conditions are fertile for a high number of errors. The inability to mark and correct those errors within the process means that they surface afterwards.
The claim about the OSM process being conducive to environmental sustainability and cost-savings also needs questioning. Scanning nearly 28 crore pages is not an ecologically trivial exercise, and the infrastructure burden on schools — stable internet, functioning computers, IT support — represents a real cost that simply moves the expense rather than eliminating it. Many schools, particularly in smaller towns and rural areas, do not have these ‘basics’ in place. The goal of involving teachers from all 33,000-plus affiliated schools in India, alongside 240 schools abroad, is admirable, but the digital divide makes a uniform rollout premature and counterproductive.
“Do we need to enforce smart classrooms and IT labs as mandatory elements without first ensuring functional washrooms and drinking water in all schools?”
-A Teacher- Evaluator (identity kept anonymous)
The Bigger Picture
Teachers who experienced the OSM evaluation work were clear that the system, in its current form, is not ready for scale. The individual problems that emerged in the process — scanning failures, server instability, time pressure, surveillance-style monitoring — are serious on their own. Taken together, they point to a rollout that prioritised rushed deadlines over readiness.
There is also a quieter concern running through these experiences: that the push towards digitisation and reduced manpower in evaluation may be part of a broader trend of replacing professional educators with technology and outsourced processes. Whether or not that is the intent, the effect of this year's implementation has been to undermine, rather than strengthen, confidence in the board examination system.
Fixing immediate problems — improving scan quality, stabilising the platform, building in adequate time, restoring space for professional consultation — would be a reasonable start. But the deeper question is whether the conditions exist across India's schools to make on-screen marking genuinely equitable. Until that question is honestly answered, the pressure to scale will continue to outrun the capacity to do it well.
Finally, we want to raise some questions with the students of the public school system in mind. What could have the fiasco meant for a government school student of Delhi?
To our mind, instead of celebrating or even welcoming the ‘gift’ of technological advancement in the form of OSM, the students of government schools would first like to demand -
Roll back CBSE fees and put into practice the promise of free education.
Roll back revaluation fees and acknowledge that a student doesn't need or have to buy the right to see their answer sheet. It's a basic to the process of education that students see their mistakes after assessment.
Publish the data of the percentage of government school students who have applied for reassessment, given its costs.
Answer why parents’ (masses being the biggest tax payers) money is being given to private companies (in the name of scanning) when evaluation was being done without the involvement of private players till now?
Why does CBSE want assessment to employ less manpower when the country has enough manpower? Who is this reduction of manpower supposed or designed to benefit?
Ensure that exorbitant fee-demanding and profiteering coaching institutions have no role in the admission-preparation for higher education and the school curriculum stays equitably relevant for the same.
Lok Shikshak Manch demands that authorities, including at the highest levels of political leadership, be held accountable for enforcing abrupt mechanisms without seeking teachers’ views or holding discussions with them, all for suspect, unsound and even ulterior motives. Such governance only ensures that what little remains of the academic calendar gets further disrupted and the examination schedule is destroyed, impacting especially negatively the teaching-learning process, academic plans and the already limited opportunities for further studies of working class students from public schools.
What we need is not a centralised examination system but neighbourhood-based, public-funded, completely free and equitable Common School System which respects diversity and promotes the values of fraternity, justice, scientific temper and rationality.
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