A Delhi student who was trolled, abused and called ‘Pakistani’ on social media after discrepancies were reported in the Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE) new on-screen marking (OSM) system was cleared on Monday after the board admitted that a technical issue led to an incorrect scanned copy being uploaded against his name number.
In an email to the student, Vedant Shrivastava, Joint Secretary (Coordination) of CBSE acknowledged the mismatch and said his grades would be reviewed soon. HT reviewed the message sent to the student.
A senior CBSE official confirmed the error but refused to explain why the mix-up occurred.
“We contacted Vedant Shrivastava today and sent him the correct answer copy through his email. His marks will be updated accordingly,” said the official, requesting anonymity.
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However, the official refused to explain how the wrong answer sheet in Physics was uploaded against Shrivastava’s registration number, saying, “We will delve into the matter and share the details later.”
The CBSE recognition comes amid growing scrutiny of the OSM system introduced this year for Class 12 board examination assessments as part of the board’s push for faster digital assessment and post-result transparency. The system will reduce human errors and improve access to answer scripts during reassessment, the board said.
However, many students have since reported issues ranging from unclear scans and missing pages to mismatched answer sheets. Shrivastava was one of them.
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He had applied for scanned copies of his answer sheets on May 19 after getting what he described as “unexpectedly low marks” in Physics when CBSE announced Class 12 results on May 13.
When he received the scanned copies on May 23, Shrivastava noticed that the physics text uploaded to his list number was not his.
He highlighted the discrepancy in a post on
“I studied for a whole year. I sacrificed sleep, peace of mind, outings and everything for these exams. And now I don’t even know if my actual physics paper was checked or not. Do students really deserve this?” he said in a post on X on May 23.
“He’s called a Pakistani, and he’s being trolled a lot.”
The post had more than 3.2 million views by Monday evening and quickly turned into a controversy on social media.
Many users accused him of trying to malign CBSE and questioned why his
Location setting on X can display broad regional identifiers like “South Asia” depending on account preferences and app settings.
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“My son had a lot of difficulty even applying for re-evaluation. After getting the scanned copies, he could not sleep properly and decided to raise the issue on X by posting screenshots of his answer scripts,” Shrivastava’s father, Sanjay Shrivastava, told HT.
He added, “He was called a Pakistani and was trolled hard because his account website was showing South Asia. His brother later explained that it was due to a technical issue while setting up the account. This affected his mental health and he is staying away from his phone now.”
Vedant’s brother, Siddhanta, later posted in support of his brother, saying they had just started his X account to report the discrepancy.
“I am Vidant’s brother and I feel terrible when I see how people call us Pakistanis. Vidant did not even have Twitter as he was busy studying instead of tweeting. We created the account just to raise his real issue,” he said.
CBSE asserted that the OSM system has improved transparency and efficiency in assessment. At a news conference on May 17, board officials defended the system and said it would also be used during the reevaluation process.
Monday was the last day for students to get scanned copies and submit objections to questions on various topics. CBSE evaluators will scrutinize the objections and review the marks by May 29.
A team of professors and technical experts from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) Madras and IIT Kanpur will help CBSE resolve glitches in the post-results services portal, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Sunday announced, amid complaints from students and parents over technical issues in the re-evaluation process and lower-than-expected grades in Class 12 examinations under the new digital evaluation system.
The CBSE Class 12 results, announced on May 13, saw the overall pass percentage fall to 85.20%, down 3.19 percentage points from 88.39% last year – the lowest since 2019.
