CBSE results row: NSUI moves Delhi High Court seeking independent probe into on-screen marking process

The National Students Union of India (NSUI), the students' wing of the Congress, moved the Delhi High Court on Tuesday seeking an independent enquiry into the alleged large-scale irregularities in CBSE's on-screen marking (OSM) system for class 12 exam.

As per the PIL (public interest litigation) filed by the NSUI, the union has also sought manual rechecking of answer scripts along with their physical verification for students who are aggrieved.

The plea also claimed that the existing grievance mechanism is inadequate as it left students with "limited digital remedies" and "no meaningful process for manual verification or independent rechecking of disputed answer books."

A vacation bench of the HC will likely hear the matter on 8 June.

In their plea, the NSUI has said that marks obtained in the class 12 board play an important role when it comes to admissions in colleges and universities, as well as getting scholarships and enrolling into professional courses. This makes errors when it comes to the evaluation of said answer scripts detrimental to the future of the students.

Among issues mentioned by students, teachers, and parents were missing pages from answer scripts, blurred scanned answer scripts, mismatches, as well as incomplete uploads. The NSUI said that such complaints point towards systemic flaws in the system and cannot be treated as isolated cases.

"The Respondent No. 2 (CBSE) itself acknowledged, through its own public communications, that the portal for obtaining scanned copies of answer books suffered technical glitches and that a very large number of applications, approximately 1,27,146 applications concerning 3,87,399 scanned answer books, had been submitted in a very short time," the plea submitted.

“This figure reflects an extraordinary level of concern and lack of confidence amongst students regarding the process. When such a large number of students seek scanned copies immediately after result declaration, the matter cannot be treated as a routine post-result formality,” the plea has stated, as per a report by Bar and Bench.

The petition, filed through advocate Rishav Ranjan, sought a direction to the authorities to formulate and implement proper safeguards, protocols and guidelines for future digital evaluation systems.

A prayer has also been made to compensate those students whose answer scripts are blurred or have gone missing.

Meanwhile, NSUI national president Vinod Jakhar said students should not suffer academic losses due to technical and administrative failures in the evaluation process.

"NSUI has strongly argued before the Court that students cannot be forced to suffer academic losses due to technical and administrative failures caused by a flawed system implemented by the examination authority itself," a statement released by the outfit said.

CBSE shares update from cybersecurity teams:

"The CBSE revaluation portal is currently supporting over 8,000 concurrent users. As of 3:00 PM today, more than 16,000 students have successfully completed their submissions," the board said in an X post on Tuesday evening.

The board also claimed that 'malicious actors' attempted to disrupt its portal services using a barrage of cyberattacks.

"Most recent being a denial of service attack attempt causing 1.5 million hits on the portal within a matter of 2 minutes and more than 1 lakh attempts of unauthorised file access," it said.

The board insisted that based on student feedback, it has "further refined the platform, including extending session time limits to make the process more convenient and seamless."

"Our teams remain vigilant and responsive to ensure our dearest students are facilitated in all ways possible," it assured.

With agency inputs