CBSE schools in Tamil Nadu are pulling off an alleged scam in the ongoing Class X and XII Term I Board exams. In a serious complaint of malpractice, the CBSE Schools Management Association (CSMA) has claimed that question papers are being leaked and teachers are helping students answer the questions by manipulating the OMR sheets.
 
CBSE had left it to the schools to formulate question papers for the Term I exams, which are being held in the multiple-choice format. Schools also have the liberty to evaluate papers with only one external supervisor. CSMA has claimed that the schools are misusing these provisions and, as a result, many students ended up scoring full marks and no student failed.
 
The details of the OMR manipulation are ingenious if anything. Students had been instructed by teachers to choose 'c' as the option for any question whose answer they were uncertain of. The teachers would then change the answer to 'a', 'b' or 'd' (lowercase) based on whatever was the correct answer. This was because it was easier to change 'c' to the other letters when in lower case. By the time CBSE was informed of these methods and ordered teachers to mark the answers only in upper case, the major papers had already concluded. Even for the minor subjects, teachers came up with another way to get around these restrictions. They simply asked the students to leave the answer blank and the teachers would fill it for them, according to a report in the Times of India.
 
In the eight-page complaint that was filed by CSMA, they also detailed the ways in which schools had been leaking question papers — right from sharing hard copies to sharing the papers on WhatsApp and via LAN. In light of these allegations, CBSE has said that they will only consider the marks of the Term I exams for the year-end result. They added that it was unfortunate that the schools had misused the board's trust.