CBSE Blank Marksheet Scandal 2026: Outrage Erupts Over Severe On-Screen Marking and Scanning Glitches
The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) faced heavy criticism after issuing blank Class 12 marksheets and mismatched answer scripts. Attributed to scanning and indexing glitches in its new On-Screen Marking (OSM) system, the data errors led to public petitions, including a Supreme Court plea, before corrections were manually issued.
Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) finds itself under great public pressure as well as mounting legal tussles due to the issuance of marks sheets that have not been filled out completely by many students enrolled in class 12 since the result announcement of May 13. The CBSE blames its problems on serious flaws in its server tagging process and its scanning process due to malfunctioning of hardware that was part of its recent digital examination system. It is only a matter of time before all these problems reach the apex judicial body of the country; the Supreme Court of India.
It has been reported that the early use of the On-Screen Marking (OSM) system resulted in physical answer sheets being either totally blank during scanning or saving digitally in extremely blurred forms. Many top-performing students aspiring to be engineers and doctors now face a dire situation as they do not see any grades for subjects or even "Result Later" notifications in their dashboard during the important period of university counseling sessions. While public pressure builds up from concerned parents and education organizations, lawyers are now calling for an investigation regarding the vendor’s software compliance process.
Anatomy of the 2026 Evaluation Collapse
The resulting collapse is due to the rush with which the On-Screen Marking (OSM) system was implemented for Class 12 examination scripts. Instead of sending the scripts in the form of hard copies to the regional centers for evaluation, the board opted for the digital version that was being handled by an outside vendor.
Some of the technical issues included:
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Hard copy scripts were fed into the scanning machine, but several operational lapses meant that many scripts scanned in were entirely blurred while others showed up as blank sheets.
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In several instances, such as the case of a Delhi student whose marksheet read "Blank Sheet" before he/she was rectified to an 81% score, the database tagged the digital scripts to incorrect student roll numbers as if they were blanks or completely belonged to another candidate.
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Most of the marksheets showed the subjects alongside the RL label meaning Result Not Declared.
Kirti Sharma is a journalist in the education domain with three and a half years of experience creating high-quality content for the education technology (EdTech) and digital media industries. She has an expertise in covering education news. Kirti has experience in writing data backed informational pieces on General knowledge.
Kirti holds a Bachelor of Arts degree, which helped build her strong foundation in writing and research. Over the course of her career, she has brought her skills to a variety of well-known companies, including ThoughtPartners Global, Infinite Group, and MIM-Essay. Through these roles, she has learned how to take complex information and turn it into engaging, easy-to-understand content for readers online.
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