Industry2026-09-26·8 min read

CBSE Class 12 Will Run Board Exams Twice in 2026-27: What the Double OSM Cycle Demands

From the 2026-27 academic year, CBSE Class 12 students can sit board examinations in both February and May. Running on-screen marking at full scale twice in one year is a challenge the board, its vendors, and the broader sector should not underestimate.

The Policy Is Confirmed

Starting with the 2026-27 academic session, CBSE Class 12 board examinations will be held twice per year. The first examination, mandatory for all students, will take place in February 2027. The second, optional for improvement, will be held in May 2027. Students may appear in up to three subjects in the second attempt, with the higher mark counting for the final certificate.

The NEP 2020 rationale is clear: reducing the single-shot pressure of one annual examination, giving students the opportunity to improve without repeating a full year. For students, the policy is a reform. For the Central Board of Secondary Education's examination infrastructure, it represents a challenge of a different order.

CBSE ran on-screen marking for Class 12 for the first time in 2026. The results were, by the board's own admission and by the scale of the subsequent crisis, not a success. 4,04,319 students applied for scanned answer sheet copies after results were declared — a revaluation-equivalent demand many times higher than any previous year. The CBSE chairman and secretary were transferred. Courts issued binding directions on audit trail requirements. A parliamentary panel heard student testimony.

Now, the same board must run OSM for Class 12 not once but twice in 2026-27 — with the first cycle beginning in roughly four months.

The Volume Mathematics

In 2026, approximately 17 lakh students registered for the Class 12 board examination. Each student sat multiple papers across subjects. Total answer booklets evaluated through OSM in 2026: approximately 9.87 million, across roughly 70,000 evaluators.

For 2026-27, the mathematics change in two directions simultaneously.

The February cycle will carry the full Class 12 cohort — all students appearing in the mandatory first examination. If registration numbers remain comparable to 2026, this is approximately 17 lakh students and close to 10 million answer booklets. The May cycle adds a subset: students choosing to appear for improvement in up to three subjects. Based on experience with CBSE's compartment examination (which serves a similar optional-improvement function), the May cycle could involve anywhere from 5 to 10 lakh students and 1 to 3 million additional booklets.

Total answer books to be scanned and evaluated digitally in 2026-27: potentially 11 to 13 million — a 10 to 30 percent increase over 2026, split across two evaluation campaigns rather than one.

This is not simply a volume increase. Running OSM twice per year doubles the demand on evaluators, who must be recruited, trained, and scheduled for two separate four-to-six-week evaluation windows in a twelve-month period. It doubles the scanning campaign. It doubles the server load management. And it does all of this against the backdrop of the 2026 crisis, with courts watching, students primed for revaluation, and public trust fragile.

The Vendor Timeline Problem

CBSE dropped the Coempt EduTeck platform (marketed as OnMark) following the 2026 crisis. The revaluation portal for Class 12 was moved onto board-controlled infrastructure by court direction. The board is now, as of September 2026, in the process of designing and procuring a new OSM platform for the 2026-27 cycle.

The timeline is uncomfortable. February 2027 is approximately four months away. A full OSM procurement cycle — Request for Proposal, technical evaluation, vendor selection, contract negotiation, system integration, user acceptance testing, evaluator training design — typically requires six to nine months when done properly. The Radha Chauhan inquiry that reviewed the Coempt procurement found that CBSE's 2025-26 process was rushed precisely because of an inadequate planning window.

What the board does in October and November 2026 to resolve its vendor situation will determine whether the February 2027 Class 12 cycle runs on a tested platform or a hastily deployed one. The sector is watching.

For examination bodies beyond CBSE — state boards, affiliating universities — the lesson is that OSM vendor selection is not a procurement event to be scheduled four months before examination. Boards that plan to run digital evaluation in 2027 need to have vendor conversations now.

Infrastructure Demands of Two Campaigns Per Year

Running OSM twice per year rather than once is not simply twice the work. Several dependencies compound.

Evaluator fatigue and availability. CBSE's 70,000 evaluators are drawn from the school teacher pool. Teachers are employed full-time by schools and can only be made available for evaluation during school vacation periods. The February examination's evaluation window falls in March-April — largely overlapping with the revision period before Class 10 and 12 examinations, which is not a school holiday. The May examination's evaluation window falls in May-June — the standard summer vacation window where evaluator availability is higher.

Running a full OSM campaign in the March-April window will require either shorter timelines (greater daily workload per evaluator) or a larger evaluator pool drawn from a wider network of eligible teachers. Neither is easy in the post-2026 environment, where evaluator dissatisfaction with OSM interfaces and training quality was prominently documented.

Scanner deployment and maintenance. OSM requires scanning infrastructure at collection points to digitise physical answer books. CBSE's 2026 scanning was distributed across regional hubs. Running two campaigns means either maintaining scanning equipment in readiness across the year — with attendant maintenance costs and obsolescence risk — or redeploying from storage, which introduces setup time into each campaign.

Server infrastructure and data management. Two separate evaluation databases, two separate result pipelines, and two separate audit log archives must be maintained for the same academic year. Data governance — which records belong to the first cycle, which to the second, how improvement marks are calculated and combined — must be implemented correctly in the backend before a single answer booklet is scanned.

Training. If evaluator training for the 2026 cycle was identified as inadequate — and the inquiry findings confirm it was — then training must be redesigned before 2026-27. Designing, piloting, and delivering competency-based evaluator training for two separate cohorts of 70,000 evaluators in a single year is a substantial programme management effort.

What the Sector Should Watch

CBSE's 2026-27 trajectory matters beyond CBSE. Universities and state boards that are planning their own OSM implementations are watching CBSE's decisions — consciously or not — as a reference point.

Several markers will indicate whether CBSE has genuinely resolved the structural problems that produced the 2026 crisis:

Vendor selection announced publicly and transparently, with technical audit results published

Evaluator training programme specification released before the examination cycle begins

Pre-result quality gate protocol established and notified

Audit trail documentation — exactly what is logged, how it is stored, who can access it — made available to institutions and, where legally required, to students

If these markers are visible by December 2026, the February 2027 cycle has a reasonable chance of running cleanly. If they are not visible, the sector should expect another round of post-result disputes — this time compounded by the twice-yearly structure, which means complaints from the February cycle will be actively unresolved while the May cycle is running.

Implications for Affiliating Universities

CBSE's twice-yearly experiment matters to affiliating universities for a specific reason: the same student population sits CBSE Class 12 in February and then, if they pass, enters university in the July-August cohort. If the February CBSE results are delayed by revaluation disputes — as they were in 2026, where the Supreme Court was issuing directions as late as August — the downstream impact on university admissions is direct.

Universities that use CBSE marks as admission criteria have an operational stake in CBSE result reliability. Universities that are planning their own OSM implementations should factor in the lesson that CBSE is currently providing: the cost of deploying digital evaluation infrastructure without adequate preparation is measured not in technology spend but in institutional reputation and legal exposure.

The September 2026 moment is a window. Universities that use it to build sound OSM capability — proper scanner infrastructure, trained evaluators, tested vendor platforms, documented procedures — will be positioned differently when their own November and December examination cycles produce results and, inevitably, revaluation requests.

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