The disaster of On Screen Marking – Part 1
This year’s exam season was distraught with the cries of thousands of students and parents, distressed by paper leaks and evaluation mishaps. Many have died by suicide because of the corruption of the education system. There has been a lot of debate on the ‘corruption of few’, and no investigation on the education ministry, private companies handling the tenders or the National Education Policy 2020 itself.
Particularly, the CBSE’s change from manual paper evaluation to the On Screen Method, has erupted a widespread chaos in the results of the 12th grade CBSE board examination. The students who applied for re-evaluation and a scanned copy of the paper (which costs hundreds) received blurred pages, missing pages and uncorrected sheets.
The corruption behind the chaos came into question only after various social media exposes by students themselves. Vedant Srivastava, a 12th grader, was confused about his really low physics marks and applied for re-evaluation; on receiving his scanned answer-sheet, he realized they were not even his answer-sheets! They had a different handwriting! He made a post on X, which triggered the media attention to the issue. The Sanghi-IT-Cell-Gundas immediately thronged the timeline and branded this 17 year old as anti-national/Pakistani before CBSE itself publicly admitted its mistake.
The pass-percentage has dipped over 3%, an all-time low. Over 20 students have died by suicide because of the sheer greed and recklessness of CBSE and the company involved. India ranks one of the highest nation in terms of suicides due to academic pressure; the pressure of a lifetime is placed on the shoulder of mere 17 year old. When they underperform, let alone fail, they are treated like criminals and denied opportunities for higher education. Forget the education system as a whole, what happens when just a part of it – evaluation – is corrupt? Are there any real consequences other than namesake transfers or resignations?
Despite the CBSE corruption and NEET paper leaks the Education Minister, the position-holders in NTA and NCERT have not been suspended or removed. But imagine you enter the NEET exam room with your earrings still on, you will be reprimanded severely! You may never write the exam again.
The CBSE brought in On Screen Marking (OSM), replacing manual correction, with the rationale of transparency and reduced human error. The board proposed that it would also make accessing students’ paper easier during re-evaluation – as an act of transparency. However, the OSM resulted in the mismanagement of answer-sheets resulting in the series of consequences shouldered by our children.
So, what went wrong?
Usually, the board examination papers are dispersed across regional offices, then sent to the exam center’s nodal officer (usually the Principal) who will distribute it to the examiners. The examiners will evaluate the papers using the marking scheme and blueprint given to them. Now, the papers will be collected and sent to a private company that will scan the sheets and upload them on to the OSM software using which the examiners will evaluate from their respective centers.
The CBSE does not own such technology, and the natural step seems to be to privatize the process. The NEP advises for all the school boards to transform their evaluation process to a more data-driven and competency based process; if and when such transformations require private intervention, it must be sought! In alignment with such instruction, the CBSE sold our students out on a tender to CoEmpt Edutek.
Time and again, over and over, we are told that ‘private’ is more efficient and less corrupt than the ‘government’. Think of what has happened to the education system since the increase of private schools – arbitrary fee hikes, lower salaries for teachers, no accountability for quality education.
And within the examination sphere – the formation of National Testing Agency (autonomous body under Ministry of Higher Education) by the BJP government was supposed to reduce the corruption and increase the accountability. Registered under the Societies Registration Act 1860, it is only by name a government body, on paper and functionally it is a full blown corporate company. The crisis of entrance examination, which was previously felt only by JEE and UPSC aspirants, is now a brunt shouldered by most students stepping into higher education because of NTA.
The NTA conducts all of its examinations through private companies; it leaves out a tender even for the very last scrap piece in its premises to the private dogs. From the security standing outside NEET exam centers to the waste paper disposal after the exams, every single process is given to private companies in tenders.
Further, these entrance examinations create more private markets (like that of coaching centers) to exploit the poor students of India who believe that education will solve their poverty. It becomes clear that NTA
Post-NTA – we have seen the worsening of medical seat mafia post-NEET, the leaking of NET paper in 2023, even in 2026 thousands of students appearing for the CUET-UG faced technical glitches that prevented them from completing the paper, these are just some examples within the ‘examination sphere’.
In this context, the CBSE decides to privatise arguably the most important examination in the country and hand over the fates of lakhs of students to a private company – CoEmpt Edutek. Before getting into the nitty gritties of this revolting corruption, it is important to note that this is not the fault of a singular private company’s corruption. It cannot be so simplistically singled out as such. The other company in the OSM tender race, Tata Consultancy Services, are the ones responsible for this year’s technical glitches in CUET-UG. Such corruption is inherent to capitalism.
The corruption private companies
CoEmpt was previously known as Globarena Techonological Solution. The company has a history of mishandling student data, especially when it comes to government tenders. In 2019, they mishandled the release of Intermediate exam results in Andhra Pradesh and got blacklisted. Within 6 months, they changed their name to Coempt Edutek Pvt Ltd which made them a new corporate entity and not in the blacklist. The bourgeosie laws systematically allow such corruption to take place and favours the private entities no matter what.
CBSE released 3 tenders for the OSM implementation company. It changed and relaxed multiple requirements and clauses in the final tender (as opposed to the original tender) to favour Coempt Edutek.
The CBSE changed the rules allowing companies that were “previously blacklisted” and have a ‘record of poor performance’ to participate in tenders! When a company is found to be involved in corruption, they are not allowed to procure tenders for a few years as a punitive measure. This is called the cool-off period. CBSE reduced this period from 2 years to 1 year. Why must a relaxation to allow corrupt companies even be made?
The company is also only at the 3rd stage of maturity in the CMMI scale. Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a grading system for a software development company’s organisational maturity – the scale assesses the capability of the company to complete projects. While the original tender required a CMMI 5, the final tender was changed to CMMI 3. They also did not possess a safety audit certificate (VAPT) from the CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) that would be useful in times of mishaps. They even decreased the technical pre-qualifications required and said that the tender prefers a company with less than 100 employees while the original tender was opposite.
CoEmpt has proven itself incapable, ill-equipped and corrupt. And yet, the tender rules have been relaxed to such a ridiculous extent coddling the bidder (CoEmpt)!
The CBSE put itself and students in a very vulnerable position by changing the terms of the punitive measures for violation of the contract. In the original tender, penalties were assigned for bad scanning quality, whereas the new one penalized the violation of deadlines and lower volume of scanning. They even decreased the scanner quality requirement from 300 DPI to 200 DPI!
Further, In terms of the backend, the original tender demands the bidder to have their own on-premises data centers and disaster recovery center. In the final tender this was completely upturned and instead the CBSE said they prefer MeitY (Ministry of electronics and information technology) empaneled but the need for on-premises data centers were removed. Coempt’s OSM software OnMark is hosted on third party cloud servers in Amazon Web Services outside India. The data is no longer sovereign and it is in an unsafe environment, making millions of students’ data vulnerable to global capitalists.
The students, teachers and the people of India must wake up and see the sinister motives behind the privatisation of education. It is not normal that these private vultures are allowed to feast over the future of our children. Over the CBSE issue the question being raised is only at CoEmpt Edutek or specific individuals of the CBSE. Whereas, questions must be raised against the process of private legal tenders within the education system itself; thereby the National Education Policy 2020.
The missing piece in this puzzle: Why does board-examination correction have to be digitised?
In this part we dealt with corruption being the central tenet of privatisation; but that still does not answer why there are rapid digitising and digitalising efforts undertaken by the state. We have inferred that there is a bigger picture behind this and it is closely connected with digitalisation as a whole. We will be exploring that in the next part, stay tuned.
