CBSE OSM row: Punjab Student Moves HC After Only Half Her Chemistry Marks Are Counted
CBSE OSM row: Punjab Class 12 student went to the High Court after her answer sheet was evaluated by both a human examiner and an automated system — but only the machine’s marks made it to her marksheet. Her case is the latest chapter in a checking saga that has shaken lakhs of families across India.
Arvind Chhabra
Chandigarh, June 24
Imagine sitting your Class 12 Chemistry board exam, writing out every answer carefully, knowing how much is riding on it — JEE rank, NEET score, college admission, everything. The result comes. The marks don’t match what you expected. You apply for a scanned copy. And then you discover something that makes no sense at all: your answer sheet was checked twice — once by a human examiner, once by a computer — but when the total was calculated, only the computer’s marks were counted.
That is exactly what a Punjab student, or more specifically Ludhiana student, is alleging in a petition filed before the Punjab and Haryana High Court.
Samaira Mittal, a Class 12 student, has moved the court against the CBSE and the government of India seeking correction of her Chemistry marks from the 2025-26 board examination. Her allegation is specific and troubling: her answer sheet was evaluated in two parts — one portion by a physical examiner, and the remaining portion through CBSE’s On-Screen Marking (OSM) automated system. But when the final marks were totalled, only the marks from the automated system were added. The physical examiner’s marks for the other portion of her paper were simply not counted.
The Punjab and Haryana High Court directed CBSE to seek instructions and file a status report. The court’s direction was unambiguous: “If the allegation raised by the petitioner is found to be correct and the present case is found to be regarding an error in calculating the total marks, CBSE shall take appropriate steps to carry out the requisite corrections.”
In plain terms: if what this student is saying is true, CBSE must fix it.
What Exactly Is OSM, and How Did We Get Here?
CBSE OSM row Ludhiana : To understand why Samaira’s case matters beyond just one student in Ludhiana, you need to understand what CBSE did this year — and why it has blown up in the board’s face.
On February 9, 2026, CBSE quietly issued a circular that would change how nearly one crore students’ answer sheets were evaluated. It mandated a new system called On-Screen Marking (OSM) for all Class 12 board answer books — for the first time, at full national scale, with no meaningful pilot.
Here is how OSM works: instead of physical answer booklets being sent to an examiner’s home or evaluation centre, they are collected, scanned at CBSE Regional Offices, uploaded to a central portal, and evaluated by teachers sitting at computers. The board sold it as a modernisation move — no more lost answer sheets in transit, no manual arithmetic errors, faster results, more transparency.
The problem? CBSE’s own governing body had advised in June 2025 to limit OSM to small-volume subjects as a trial. The board ignored that advice and went full-scale, across all subjects, for all 98.66 lakh Class 12 answer sheets, evaluated digitally by around 70,000 teachers — most of them trained for just one week on a system none of them had used before.
When the Results Came, So Did the Horror Stories
CBSE OSM row: 12th Results were declared on May 13, 2026. The pass percentage fell from 88.39% last year to 85.2%. And within days, families across India began discovering things that should not be possible in a board examination.
— Students who had cleared JEE Mains came home to find they had failed their board exams.
— Answer sheets came back with blurred scans — handwriting so unclear that fair evaluation was almost impossible.
— Students found entire pages of their answers had not been checked at all.
— Some students discovered the scanned answer sheet uploaded under their roll number was not even theirs — it belonged to someone else entirely. CBSE later acknowledged at least one such error after it went viral on social media.
— Page-level marks in some papers did not add up to the total shown on the marksheet.
— The re-evaluation portal crashed repeatedly during payments, leaving students locked out and deadlines ticking.
Samaira Mittal’s case adds yet another dimension to this list: an answer sheet checked by two different evaluators — human and machine — but with only one of their marks actually counted.
The Vendor Nobody Should Have Hired
CBSE OSM row: The controversy ran deeper than just technical glitches. The OSM system was built and run by a Hyderabad-based company called Coempt Edu Teck — which won the contract as the lowest financial bidder on December 5, 2025. That left just 66 days between the contract award and CBSE’s February 9 nationwide rollout announcement.
Coempt beat TCS for the contract. Then a 17-year-old student, Sarthak Sidhant, dug into the company’s background and found something alarming: Coempt Edu Teck was formerly known as Globarena — the same company linked to the 2019 Telangana intermediate results disaster, where evaluation errors caused over 3.8 lakh students to fail and led to 21 suicides. Sidhant later presented his findings before a Parliamentary committee.
And Then a Teenager Found the Security Holes
CBSE OSM row: If the vendor’s track record was not alarming enough, a 19-year-old Class 12 student and ethical hacker named Nisarga Adhikary claimed he had found critical security vulnerabilities in the OSM portal — including the ability to access examiner accounts using publicly available information, and a password that was simply embedded in the system’s own code. He reported the vulnerabilities to CERT-In in February 2026. Most remained unpatched by May.
Adhikary also alleged that answer sheets and question papers stored on an Amazon Web Services server were publicly accessible online due to improper configuration — meaning, in theory, anyone could have accessed them.
A subsequent PTI report, citing government sources, confirmed that the revaluation portal’s payment system was hit by a malicious cyberattack, with around 50 students gaining unauthorised access.
Teachers Were Also Struggling
This was not just a student problem. The examiners tasked with evaluating answer sheets on the OSM portal were themselves overwhelmed.
“The training was just for one week and they expect us to know how to use these computers at a rapid rate,” said a teacher from Pune. “Adapting to this is beyond irritating.”
A teacher from Bengaluru described how the software’s colour-coded marking interface was so unforgiving that a single wrong click could reset an entire answer booklet’s evaluation — forcing her to restart. “I am correcting the same booklet ten times,” she said.
Teachers in Delhi were issued show-cause notices when Class 12 results at their schools declined — penalising individual educators for what critics argued were systemic, structural failures.
CBSE’s Response — and What It Has Done Since
CBSE OSM row — Faced with a national uproar, CBSE insisted that answer sheets were evaluated by trained human evaluators and not by AI. The board defended OSM, saying the process was designed to improve transparency and reduce manual errors. It also:
— Sharply reduced re-evaluation fees after students protested that charges were unreasonable given that CBSE already had all answer sheets scanned.
— Launched a helpline for affected students.
— Introduced a refund policy: if marks increase after re-evaluation, the fee paid may be refunded.
— Expanded access to scanned answer sheets, making them mandatory viewing before any re-evaluation application.
As of now, CBSE has not announced any plan to discontinue the OSM system.
Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi targeted Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan directly over the Coempt contract, calling out the company’s Globarena past and accusing the government of “ruining the futures of lakhs of students.” Pradhan defended the procurement process and accused Gandhi of opposing Digital India.
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CBSE OSM row : What Happens Next for Samaira
CBSE OSM row: The Punjab and Haryana High Court has sought a report by the next date in Samaira Mittal’s case. CBSE must file a status report by then. If the board confirms the error — that the physical examiner’s marks were indeed left out of her total — it has been directed to correct the marks and file a compliance report.
For a Chemistry student in Punjab, the stakes could not be more personal. Chemistry marks feed directly into NEET and JEE eligibility, aggregate percentage calculations, and college admission cut-offs.
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