After the matter blew up on social media, CBSE joint secretary (coordination) acknowledged the mismatch and informed him that his marks would be corrected.

Class 12 student Vedant Shrivastava, who only flagged a mix-up of his Physics board exam answer sheet, was subjected to trolling on social media and was even labelled a ‘Pakistani’, all for flagging discrepancies in the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE)’s new On-Screen Marking (OSM) system. He later received an apology from the board over the mix-up, but his attempt to get his actual answer sheet assessed correctly also exposed him to the darker side of social media.

Notably, ever since CBSE declared the Class 12 examination results, students have raised concerns about the OSM-based evaluation system used to assess answer sheets. The overall Class 12 pass percentage also dropped by 3.19 percentage points to 85.20 this year. Following the backlash, the board opened a window allowing students to access scanned copies of their checked answer books.

However, complaints continued over errors and technical problems in the re-evaluation process. Some Class 12 students claimed the answer sheets uploaded by CBSE did not appear to match their own handwriting, which led to fresh concerns about possible mismatches in the OSM system.

The Vedant Shrivastava case
The Delhi student had requested scanned copies of his answer sheets on May 19 after receiving what he called “unexpectedly low marks” in Physics when CBSE released the Class 12 results on May 13.

After receiving the scanned copies on May 23, he realised the Physics answer sheet linked to his roll number did not belong to him.

He pointed out the issue in a post on X and uploaded side-by-side screenshots from his English and Computer Science papers to show that the handwriting in the Physics script was different.

“I studied for an entire year. I sacrificed sleep, peace of mind, outings, everything for these exams. And now I don’t even know whether my actual Physics paper was checked. Do students really deserve this?” he said in a post on X on May 23.

Called ‘Pakistani’ for flagging discrepancy
By Monday evening, the post had crossed 3.2 million views and soon turned into a bigger social media controversy.

Soon after, he became the target of trolling and abusive comments online. Several users accused him of trying to damage CBSE’s image and questioned why his X profile location showed “South Asia”. Some called him “anti-national”, while others labelled him “Pakistani”.

Among those who initially called the student a “Pakistani” was Doordarshan News journalist Ashok Shrivastav. He later apologised, but his remarks sparked massive backlash online.