The revaluation clock is ticking down to 29th May, and Congress leader KC Venugopal, who heads the PAC, has put it to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to have a word with the CBSE. The Board has been quick to say there has been no foul play with its On-Screen Marking set-up, even as students are pointing out where things have gone wrong with their marks or access.
You can feel the impact right away, according to the families and students involved: the path to higher education is in jeopardy and nerves are frayed. Venugopal, for one, has seen how this is affecting lakhs of candidates here and in the Gulf, and he sees the stress of exam season turning into full-blown protests and a pile-up of grievances.
Why KC Venugopal is pressing for action
“We have had some catastrophic discrepancies,” Venugopal wrote in a letter on 26th May, putting the blame on the digital side of things. He has heard from students whose right answers were given a zero, or whose answer sheets came out as a blur or a crop when they went to check them, making it impossible to make sense of what they were paying to see.
He put forward an example of a student who opened his Physics paper and found the handwriting was not his – a mix-up, plain and simple. Then you have the verification site caving in under the load, which only added to the panic. And in some cases, he says, revaluation has come with a bill of anywhere from Rs 8,000 to over Rs 69,000, which seems like a lot for a routine matter.
It is not just the technology. The MP from Congress has made the case that some question papers were harder than others, putting a few at a loss and fuelling the demand for some grace marks. In his view, it is a situation that is bad for a student’s future and for their peace of mind.
Venugopal wants to see a resolution before the doors to admission shut. “They should not be made to suffer, be it in their pocket, their grades or their head, for a failure of the system,” he said. With the date to get a copy of your answer sheet now in the past and 29th May looming for revaluation, he is asking for some leeway.
This is what the MP is asking the Centre to do about it:
– A one-off way to put things right, and on a set schedule
– Make sure revaluation doesn’t cost the student anything
– Some guarantee that they won’t miss an admission deadline
CBSE puts the record straight on OSM
There has been talk online of a compromised portal, but the CBSE has said its live system is fine. The Board has stood by the fact that there has been no breach of the platform used for the actual work of evaluation. As for the OSM, they say it is all about being open and having a way to handle complaints.
Testing URL vs the real thing
Some of the fuss has been over viral posts, and the CBSE has waded in to explain. The link in question, cbse.onmarks.co.in, is for testing with sample numbers for their own eyes. It is not where the answer books are being marked; that is done on a separate URL without the holes people are talking about.
In the Board’s words, you will find no real data, marks or records on the test portal. CBSE has put it on record that the live evaluation environment is as secure and sound as can be, with the right safeguards in place. And to be clear, the whole point of OSM was to be open about how things are done, not to hide behind a curtain.
Alleged vulnerabilities put a fine point on the issue
Things came to a head when 19-year-old Nisarga Adhikary, a hacker who made his way in the world on his own, put out a blog post pointing to some serious holes in the OSM system – the one that handles results for over two million students a year. He says he let them know about it three months back in good faith, but only saw half-measures in return.
In his piece, Adhikary lays out what he found:
– A master password left in the open in client-side JavaScript
– A way to get around 2FA or OTP checks
– You could get into the admin side of things without a token
– No need for an old password to reset a user’s
– An IDOR bug that lets you put on another user’s hat and alter marks
Then on Tuesday, the CBSE site went down and the backlash got louder. Deedy Das, a tech investor, didn’t mince words on X, calling it an embarrassment. Others on social media were having none of the idea of a “master” password in the code, or the time it took to do something about it.
Adhikary’s claims have riled people up and there are calls for some real accountability in how India’s exam system is run, even if there’s no hard proof anyone has made off with anything. CBSE for its part will have it no other way: their portal was never in the kind of trouble he’s suggesting.
You can see the toll on a Delhi student
Take Vedant Shrivastava, a Class 12 from Delhi. He noticed the Physics answer sheet under his roll number wasn’t in his hand. When he made a post about it on X, it was seen by more than 3.2 million people.
CBSE put a pin in it, admitted there was a mix-up, and said they were on it to fix the result. But online, the student was made of it. Some called him an anti-national, even a Pakistani. His family says it was all groundless and hard to take.
His brother put it down to a setting on the account that put him in South Asia. One journalist who had used the label has since put in an apology. Then the politicians waded in; Rahul Gandhi had a word for the BJP IT cell, saying they should be looking at the boy’s problem, not making him the target.
What’s to come
The Centre has some IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur types in to look at the website. Venugopal says that’s a band-aid for functionality, not the root cause of a botched first round of evaluation. He wants a proper fix.
With the revaluation window shutting on May 29 and the time to get your answer sheets gone, Venugopal is after a one-off, no-nonsense solution so a kid doesn’t miss an admission because of this. He’s putting the ball in the Prime Minister’s court for some quick help.
CBSE wants to show you can trust OSM and that they’ll make things right. The students just want to know where they stand, be able to revalue, and have a level playing field before colleges start turning people away.
It comes down to this: will the government open up a special window for relief, and can CBSE move fast enough to show its process is fair? With 2026 results in the wind, there’s not much time and everyone is watching.
