CBSE digitised its entire Class 12 evaluation — 40 crore scanned pages, 9.8 million answer books. It then needed three high school students to explain to a parliamentary panel what had gone wrong.
CBSE's On-Screen Marking system, rolled out for the 2026 Class 12 examinations, distributed wrong answer sheets to evaluators, served blurred and illegible scans, lost pages mid-evaluation, and produced India's lowest national pass rate in seven years: 85.2%. Three students — including 17-year-old Sarthak Sidhant from Ranchi — independently studied CBSE's own tender documents, identified 15 specific discrepancies, published them publicly, and were called to testify before a parliamentary committee. By June 3, both CBSE Chairman Rahul Singh and Secretary Himanshu Gupta had been removed from their posts. The government then opened a re-evaluation portal to handle the fallout — which received 1.5 million hits in its first two minutes and immediately came under a denial-of-service cyberattack. India's board examination authority had nine months to prepare a digital system for 10 million students. Three of those students identified the problems. The institution identified none.