85.2% pass rate, swapped answer scripts, broken portals: CBSE's crashing digital overhaul - All you need to know

CBSE's Class 12 results this year did not just disappoint students; they set off a chain of events that has put India's largest school examination body under its most intense scrutiny in recent memory. What began as post-result frustration has since unravelled into something far more serious: questions about whether the board's new digital evaluation system was ever ready for the scale at which it was deployed.

Here is a clear account of what happened and where things stand.

Digital overhaul: The new system at the centre of it all

This year, CBSE made a significant shift in how Class 12 answer sheets are evaluated. Instead of physical scripts being handed to examiners, answer sheets were scanned and assessed entirely online, a method known as On-Screen Marking. Roughly 98.66 lakh scripts were processed this way, with around 70,000 examiners working digitally across the country.

The logic was sound: reduce handling errors, speed up the process, and improve consistency in marking. What followed was the opposite.

Results day and the first wave of anger

When results were declared on May 13, the pass percentage for Class 12 dropped to 85.2%, down from 88.39% the previous year, and the sharpest fall in several years. Almost immediately, students began reporting that their scores in science and mathematics subjects were far lower than anything their preparation had suggested.

Social media quickly filled with students describing gaps of 20, 30, and even 40 marks between what they expected and what they received. Parents pointed to pre-board performances, mock test scores, and entrance exam readiness as evidence that something did not add up. Some students said portions of their answers appeared to have gone unassessed. Others said the digital copies of their scripts were too unclear to even read properly.

A transparency measure that backfired

As criticism mounted, CBSE introduced a revised process allowing students to view scanned copies of their evaluated answer sheets before deciding whether to apply for re-evaluation. The intention was to give students more visibility into how they had been marked.

Demand for these scanned copies reached extraordinary levels, roughly one in four students applied to see their scripts. That figure is worth sitting with. This was not a subset of students who felt hard done by. A quarter of all students no longer felt confident that their papers had been marked fairly or accurately.

The portal that couldn't hold

CBSE's online portal, through which students were applying for copies and paying the associated fees, began breaking down under the load. Transactions failed repeatedly. Some students found themselves charged more than once for the same application. In at least one widely circulated case, a student was apparently billed close to Rs 3 lakh for accessing four answer sheets, an amount that was clearly erroneous.

The board acknowledged the technical failures and said refunds would be issued. But the timing was brutal. Students juggling entrance exam counselling and college admission deadlines were losing hours.

Eventually, the situation escalated to the point that the Education Ministry brought in technical teams from IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur, along with representatives from four public sector banks, to help restore stability.

The answer sheet that belonged to someone else

While the portal crisis was still playing out, a separate incident surfaced that raised far more fundamental concerns.

A student named Vedant discovered that the Physics answer sheet displayed against his roll number on the portal was not his. The case gained significant attention online, and CBSE subsequently confirmed that an incorrect script had indeed been mapped to his account. The right one was eventually provided.

The board's confirmation, while resolving Vedant's individual case, opened a much larger question. If one student's answer sheet had been incorrectly assigned in the system, there was no straightforward way to assure others that the same had not happened to them. The issue was no longer about marking standards. It was about whether the foundational accuracy of the system, matching the right script to the right student, could be relied upon.

A security claim that added fuel

Around the same time, a student who described himself as an ethical hacker made a public claim that he had found a way into portions of CBSE's evaluation infrastructure, and had done so roughly three months earlier, in under half an hour. He alleged the access extended to examiner-level functions within the system.

CBSE pushed back firmly, saying no breach of the live evaluation portal had occurred and that what the student accessed was a test environment carrying only dummy data. The core system, the board maintained, had not been compromised.

The claims have not been independently verified. But CBSE's own newly launched portal was, at the time of these denials, returning error messages for visitors, an unfortunate detail that did little to reinforce their position.

Questions about the vendor

Running through all of this is a thread that has not been fully addressed publicly. Coempt Eduteck, a Hyderabad-based technology company involved in building parts of the digital evaluation system, has come under considerable scrutiny. Educators, parents, and commentators have raised questions about how a platform underpinning such a high-stakes national process could face simultaneous failures across so many different areas, from image quality and portal reliability to the basic accuracy of document assignment.

No official investigation has established any specific failing on the vendor's part. But the broader concern, whether CBSE adequately stress-tested and governed this transition before rolling it out at a national scale, has not been answered.