CBSE On-Screen AI-Assisted Evaluation — digitised, AI-monitored marking for India's board exams

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), which oversees roughly 29,000 affiliated schools across India, is rolling out On-Screen Marking (OSM) for Class XII answer scripts. Papers are scanned at regional centres and assigned a unique barcode so the examiner never sees the student's identity; scripts are then displayed to human examiners on-screen, with an AI layer auto-tallying marks and monitoring examiner behaviour, flagging scripts marked unusually quickly or with inconsistent patterns for supervisory review. A dedicated digital-evaluation and AI centre was established in Dwarka, New Delhi, where mock evaluations were run ahead of the 2025-26 rollout, per CBSE circulars issued between February and May 2026.

In an internal CBSE pilot covering 250+ answer sheets, AI-supported scoring checks diverged from expert human graders by only 3-5 marks on average, and participating teachers reported saving over 8 hours per week previously spent on manual tallying and script logistics. During the 2024-25 session, CBSE separately used AI-based cross-checks comparing internal school-assessment marks against board-exam marks, identifying inconsistent internal assessment at a number of schools and issuing advisories to affiliated institutions.

The system does not autonomously grade descriptive answers — human examiners remain the assessors of record — and the pilot's quantitative results (marks variance, hours saved) come from CBSE and affiliated-school reporting rather than an independent peer-reviewed evaluation. This is best read as an early-stage, process-quality-focused deployment rather than a proven learning-outcome intervention.

Read the full analysis: https://www.cbse.gov.in/cbsenew/examination_circular.html