‘Getting panic attacks’: College deadlines loom with students trapped in CBSE chaos |
Saransh, 19, from Meerut, had been studying twelve to thirteen hours a day since mid-April, surviving on sleepless nights and BITSAT mock tests, chasing a seat at BITS Pilani. He needed 75 percent in PCM (Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics) but fell short by a few marks. When his answer sheets finally arrived, four different teachers independently checked his Chemistry paper and found discrepancies of 8 to 12 marks each.
His birthday was on May 13, the day the results came out. Feeling disappointed with his marks, he didn’t leave his room that day. His parents tried their best to cheer him up, but to no avail. The college they’d all hoped for was now closed to him, not because he had failed, but because the board had given him marks lower than he deserved.
Pandemonium on May 13
This year, for the first time, CBSE evaluated Class 12 answer sheets through its new On-Screen Marking system (OSM), a reform the board had promised would eliminate errors and make post-result verification of marks “no longer necessary.”
But when the results came out on May 13, it was pandemonium. Pages were missing from answer sheets, scans were blurred, wrong sheets were delivered to wrong students, and step marking was absent across thousands of papers. On June 2, the CBSE chairman and secretary were transferred, and an inquiry into the procurement of the OSM system was ordered. The re-evaluation portal opened the same day, a day later than the education ministry’s own deadline, and with an Aadhaar authentication requirement nobody had been warned about, which the board had introduced for “security reasons”.
Legal experts told The Hindu that the Supreme Court has held mandatory Aadhaar authentication unconstitutional. The board’s workaround for students without Aadhaar is to use a parent’s or guardian’s card. By the afternoon of June 2, over 16,000 students had filed applications.
Calls to Dr Vineet Joshi, Secretary of the Department of Higher Education under the Ministry of Education, went unanswered. Questions sent........