Board Games: The curious afterlife of the Class 12 marksheet

My son came home yesterday with a question that stopped me cold. "Mom, can I just skip the board exams next year? I am going to take the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) anyway. What's even the point?" He's sixteen. He will be appearing for his Class 12 Board exam in 2027. After everything that's unfolded this year, and the anxiety spiralling through WhatsApp parent groups like wildfire, I couldn't summon the confident maternal reassurance I wanted to give him. Because, honestly, I didn't have a good answer to his question. Read Full Story I grew up in an India where your Class 12 percentage was essentially your social credit score. It determined whether you were "bright" or "average," whether aunties at weddings congratulated your parents or offered them a sympathetic cup of chai. A 90% was genuinely exceptional, something that got your name in local newspapers, and made relatives invoke your example at family gatherings for years afterward. That India feels very far away now. And yet, here we are, still tethered to the same examination and result system, watching our children buckle under its weight. That is the reason so many students still desperately want to get their CBSE Class 12 marks re-evaluated this year. Because the marksheet matters. Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan told India Today TV on May 28 that he expects, "20 per cent of the four lakh students who requested their answer scripts to apply for re-evaluation." This works out to roughly 80,000 students asking the board to check its work again. It’s easy to dismiss that as a percentage. It’s harder when you realise that each of those applications belongs to a teenager sitting at a dining table somewhere, trying to make sense of a result they no longer fully trust. THE YEAR THE EXAM LOST ITS INNOCENCE Let me be clear about what happened this year. For the first time, the board adopted large-scale On-Screen Marking (OSM), with evaluators assessing scanned copies of answer sheets instead of physical scripts. What was meant to make evaluation more efficient quickly spiralled into one of CBSE’s biggest post-result controversies in years. Students complained of unexpectedly low scores, questions were raised over missing pages, incomplete scans, unchecked answers and technical glitches. Within days, more than four lakh students had sought access to their answer sheets, requesting over 11 lakh answer books. We reported on this unfolding mess in an article published on May 27. Read it here. Since then, the controversy has taken another unexpected turn. A 17-year-old Class 12 student has published a detailed analysis claiming that flaws in the CBSE tender process may have contributed to the problems surrounding the OSM rollout. Just a year older than my son, he wasn’t spending his summer debating college applications or career choices. He was pouring over procurement documents, tender clauses and evaluation criteria, trying to understand how a system that affects millions of students may have gone so badly wrong. There is something remarkable, and deeply unsettling, about that. The most striking part of this entire episode wasn’t the complaints themselves. It was what they revealed. For perhaps the first time, large numbers of students and parents weren’t asking, “How many marks did I get?” They were asking, “Can I trust the marks I got?” My son was watching all of this unfold in real time. Social media overflowed with testimonies from teenagers who had studied for months, only to find their efforts potentially invalidated by failures they had no role in creating. The Union Education Minister even acknowledged "isolated incidents" and promised stringent action, but the damage to public trust, and to the mental health of an entire cohort of students, has been profound to say the least. "I studied for two years, sacrificed my weekends, gave up everything," one Class 12 student from Delhi told India Today.in. "And now I don't even know if my marks are correct." My son saw that clip too, and he has been anxious ever since. THE NUMBERS THAT HAUNT US Here's the paradox that makes this conversation so difficult. In 2004, about 20% of those who took the CBSE Class 12 test scored above 75%. A score of 90% placed you comfortably in the top 5-6% of examinees, making it a genuine marker of academic excellence. In 2024, the pass percentage had significantly risen to 87.98%, with over 22,000 students scoring above 95%. The number of students scoring 90% and above has ballooned to the point where it's not considered exceptional any more. In many competitive urban circles, it is almost expected. What changed? Grade inflation, for one. The shift to a more lenient marking policy. The explosion of coaching centres that have turned test-taking to a science. And perhaps a collective societal pressure that made anything below 90% feel like failure. "The exam has become a victim of its own success. When everyone achieves high marks, the marks themselves lose meaning. But w