‘Over 17 Lakh Students At Stake’: Delhi HC Refuses To Reopen CBSE Re-evaluation Portal | India News
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The bench observed that reopening the portal could delay the entire evaluation process and affect over 17 lakh students awaiting final results.
The CBSE On-Screen Marking (OSM) controversy erupted after thousands of Class 12 students reported drastic discrepancies. (PTI File)
CBSE OSM Row: Delhi High Court on Friday rejected to grant any urgent relief in the row over CBSE’s On-Screen Marking (OSM) system, refusing to direct the reopening of the verification and reevaluation portal for Class XII students.
While hearing a PIL filed by the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI) alleging “large scale irregularities and deficiencies” under the OSM system, a vacation bench of Justice Neena Bansal Krishna and Justice Madhu Jain observed that reopening the portal could delay the entire evaluation process and affect over 17 lakh students awaiting final results and college admissions, Livelaw reported.
“Let individual students approach. They will take care,” the High Court said, adding that the final results of students will get delayed if the request is accepted.
Appearing for the Centre and CBSE, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta opposed the petition, saying that any extension would impact the academic future of 17.8 lakh students who appeared for the Class XII examinations.
Mehta told the High Court that 17.80 lakh students appeared for the exams and CBSE received 98.66 lakh answer sheets. He said more than four lakh students had already applied for scanned copies of answer sheets, while 1.67 lakh students sought reevaluation after the portal was opened between June 2 and June 7.
According to the Centre, over 3.8 lakh answer sheets are currently undergoing reevaluation.
The High Court noted that while the petition sought only a one-week extension, reopening the process would trigger several subsequent steps and could delay the overall schedule by nearly a month.
“For you it is one week. But the whole process gets delayed by a month,” the bench observed.
The NSUI petition claimed students faced issues including blurred scans, missing pages, incomplete uploads, answer sheet mismatches and unexpectedly low marks under the OSM system. It argued that the existing grievance mechanism was inadequate and sought manual verification in disputed cases.
The row eruoted amid scrutiny of the board’s newly introduced On-Screen Marking (OSM) system following reports of answer-sheet mismatches and technical glitches during the evaluation of Class 12 examinations this year.
Concerns were raised after the declaration of Class 12 results, when some students reportedly found that answer sheets uploaded against their names did not belong to them. Government sources told news agency PTI that CBSE detected around 20 cases where students were shown answer sheets belonging to other candidates after the board introduced its OSM system this year.
Under the new model, answer sheets were scanned and evaluated digitally. According to sources, more than 98 lakh answer booklets, amounting to nearly 40 crore pages, were scanned during the process. Officials said around 68,000 answer sheets were found to have scanning-quality issues and had to be scanned again.
Even after rescanning, more than 13,000 answer sheets failed to meet the required standards and were therefore checked manually.
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