An IIT expert team will submit a report after a “complete review” of CBSE’s technology ecosystem

Image is for representational purposes only. file | Photo credit: The Hindu

Following numerous complaints by Class 12 students about irregularities in the marking of their answer sheets, a four-member team with two experts each from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras and IIT Kanpur will conduct a “complete review” of the IT ecosystem of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and submit a confidential report to the board, said I Hinduras, director of IIT The Madakoti.

More than four million students applied for scanned copies of 11 million answer sheets amid complaints of blurry scans, incorrect tallies, mismatched or missing sheets and a pass rate of 85.20%, the lowest since 2019.

The expert team will give recommendations to the CBSE on how to carry out the processes, including recalculation of marks and reevaluation of questions, Mr. Kamakoti said.

While the CBSE introduced a “screen marking system” for digitized answer scripts with the intention of allowing expert evaluators from across India to mark the papers, it created some problems, which the CBSE admitted, Mr. Kamakoti said.

“While several lakh answer scripts have been scanned and inserted into various files, there is a possibility that the sheet is missing during scanning because the person scanning the sheet did not insert it properly or the image quality suffered,” Mr. Kamakoti said.

The expert team is also probing the reasons behind the multiple crashes of the CBSE portal for revaluation applications. “It could be a cyber attack or there could be an increase in real user requests. For example, when bots keep pumping requests, you see a sudden spike in traffic and the portal starts to slow down. Many students complained that payments were not going through (which could be) because the site was busy handling many requests,” explained Mr. Kamakoti.

He added that if many requests land on the same IP address, the web application’s firewall, while queuing the requests in a buffer, is unable to send all the requests to the server, which is why users have experienced failed payments, he added.

Examining CBSE’s IT ecosystem was a “complicated” process and the team would take several days to arrive at its recommendations, he said. “This is not a one-day job. Depending on the complexity of the systems, the team will take a few days to arrive at recommendations and submit a confidential report to CBSE,” Mr. Kamakoti said.

Published – 27 May 2026 21:30 IST