CBSE’s OSM System Fiasco; Satirical Student Movement Protests

June

2026

Class 12 students in Panjab and across India are stuck in uncertainty due to glitches in the Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE) new On-Screen Marking (OSM) system that was meant to modernize evaluation. Students have alleged unchecked answers, incorrect marking of Multiple-Choice Questions, blurred scanned copies, and incorrect answer sheets. OSM was announced on 9 Feb—a week before the Class 12 Board Exams—during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Pariksha pe Charcha (conversations around exams). OSM was deployed on 3 Mar. Rushed implementation meant insufficient system testing, leading to portal crashes, login failures, slow-loading user interfaces, and poor scan quality. An estimated 25–30K teachers participated in the onscreen marking, but reported that training was limited to a few hurried webinars and mock evaluations. Raj Kumar, an evaluator from Police DAV School, Jalandhar, said detailed instructions arrived just 12–15 days before the evaluation, with minimal hands-on training. Furthermore, evaluators had to juggle marking with teaching and administrative responsibilities, including Booth Level Officer duties in the Panjab Civic Polls. A non-medical student from Jalandhar, Himanshu, said he attempted almost all questions in Physics but scored only 14 out of 70. His scanned copy showed that several answers were not evaluated. 17-year-old Sarthak Sidhant from Jharkhand exposed the OSM system as a major tender scam, leading the Union government to transfer CBSE Chairman Rahul Singh and Secretary Himanshu Gupta. The re-evaluation portal announced for 29 May finally opened on 2 Jun and kept crashing intermittently. More than 17K students from Panjab alone have applied for re-evaluation. The CBSE scam has come weeks after the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) paper leak that led to suicides by five students. Incidentally, the frustrated youth of India were termed as parasites and cockroaches by the Chief Justice of India Surya Kant on 15 May, leading to the birth of a satirical political movement Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), by a US-based student Abhijeet Dipke. On 6 Jun, CJP called its first on-ground protest at Jantar-Mantar in Delhi, which was attended by students from across the country. The Delhi police said it decided to allow the protest to pacify the youth’s anxiety over the recent exam leaks and glitches. CJP demands the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, under whom the recent CBSE and NEET examinations turned into fiascos (earlier coverage).