An internal monitoring report from a pilot of the Central Board of Secondary Education’s on-screen marking system, conducted in five Delhi schools in January 2026, cited at least 36 technical, operational and assessment-related concerns – including risks of “blind or superficial screening”, weak supervisory oversight, lack of safeguards against data loss, and a finding that the system did not provide an opportunity for assessors to deliberate or reach consensus on marks – weeks before the board rolled out it nationally for the Class 12 Board. Exams.
The report, seen by HT, was written by internal monitors and submitted to the board on January 21.
A FAQ document issued by the CBSE in May — after the results sparked controversy — suggests the board was aware of at least some of the issues: many of the safeguards it said it had taken reflected concerns reported in January.
CBSE did not respond to HT’s queries on the monitoring report or its findings. The board’s FAQ described the pilot as providing “an outline of the modifications needed in the system,” one official said.
What the report indicated
The report warned that the system “does not provide opportunities for assessors to interact, deliberate or reach consensus during the allocation of marks, which is essential for fair and uniform assessment.”
She pointed out the “danger of superficial assessment”, recording that “answer texts were submitted after annotation and arbitrary marking without thorough reading, leading to instances of blind or superficial checking”.
The report also noted that there was “no mechanism for additional senior examiners to return answer scripts to assessors when multiple errors are detected, allowing re-evaluation and correction before final submission”.
AHEs were also unable to review the answer scripts of their choice, as the application assigns the scripts automatically, limiting effective monitoring and quality assurance.
There are two specific findings recorded in the report that explain the details: “Feedback is not visible to AHE even after verification” and “No text to display edits on HE portal”.
Technical limitations exacerbated the problem. The report cited slow performance while marking steps, absence of auto-saving, inability to view question papers and marking systems simultaneously, instances where student written content was hidden behind digitally entered marks, inconsistent subject code and failure to provide question mark marks for incomplete answers. It also recorded a “marked reluctance” among raters to assess additional transcripts due to “increased cognitive load, time consumption and operational challenges,” and warned that longer answers were “not separated into logical parts,” increasing the potential for inconsistency and fatigue.
What did the FAQ say?
A FAQ document issued by CBSE on May 18, titled ‘Know about OSM’, was released as complaints from students over the results gained momentum. There are several safeguards that closely track the warnings in the January report.
The FAQ mentioned that a save option was added, the tag deletion process was changed, and the issue of tags hiding written content was fixed. She said net speed issues were solved by using high-capacity servers. The dry running report noted all of these things.
The principal and principal nodal supervisor (CNS) of the CBSE-affiliated Delhi school told HT that the supervisory structure under OSM bore little resemblance to the manual system it replaced. Under manual assessment, subject-specific centers work with teams of about 20 people – heads of higher education, higher education assistants to coordinate and review the assessment, and evaluators – under the supervision of the subject-aligned central nervous system.
AHEs can independently select any answer text to moderate whenever discrepancies are noted.
Under OSM, HEs received only two scripts a day for review and AHEs three to five, assigned automatically through the portal, with no ability to independently select scripts for critical review, said the Delhi-based CNS cited above.
