NEW DELHI: The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) on Tuesday said malicious actors attempted to disrupt services on its re-evaluation portal through a barrage of cyberattacks. The statement came after thousands of students complained since early morning that they were unable to log in and proceed with the re-evaluation process.
In an official statement, the Board said the portal currently supports 8,000 concurrent users and that 16,000 students had successfully completed their re-evaluation submissions by 3 pm.
“While thousands of students accessed the CBSE re-evaluation portal today, malicious actors attempted to disrupt services through a barrage of cyberattacks. Most recent being a denial of service attack attempt causing 1.5 million hits on the portal within a matter of 2 minutes and more than 1 lakh attempts of unauthorised file access.”
The CBSE said the platform had been further refined based on student feedback. Session time limits have also been extended to make the process more convenient and seamless.
Students also criticised the requirement for Aadhaar verification. In a separate statement, the CBSE said, “Aadhaar Verification has been included for security reasons.”
The Board clarified that students who do not have an Aadhaar card may use the Aadhaar details of a parent, relative or guardian.
“In this case, the Aadhaar Name, Date of birth and Gender must be of the person whose Aadhaar number is used,” it added.
The portal was opened early on Tuesday to begin the re-evaluation process, with the CBSE announcing its availability at 4.42 am through its social media handles. Since then, a steady stream of complaints has appeared on the Board’s X handle, with students reporting difficulties accessing the site.
The Class XII marks re-evaluation portal ran into trouble soon after becoming operational, with some students reporting technical issues. The portal was originally scheduled to go live on May 29, but the date was subsequently shifted to June 1 and then June 2.
At 4.42 am, CBSE announced on social media that students could apply for re-evaluation through the portal and also released a video tutorial explaining the process.
A total of 17,68,968 students appeared for the Class XII examinations this year. Earlier data released by the Board showed that 4,04,319 applications were received for copies of evaluated answer sheets across subjects, covering 11,31,961 answer sheets. The surge followed controversy over lower marks allegedly awarded to some students under the new On Screen Marking System (OSM).
Advocate Vineet Jindal took to X that he had received complaints from several students and shared a screenshot sent by one of them.
"The re-evaluation portal of CBSE is still facing glitches and technical issues. Sharing this screenshot as received from a student. Several students have reported difficulties in accessing their answer sheets and completing the re-evaluation process due to persistent portal-related problems. CBSE should urgently address these issues and ensure that students are not prejudiced because of technical failures beyond their control."
Another user, Deepak Suryavanshi also shared his experience:"It's still not working, after filling log-in details & filling Captcha etc, its doesnt log in, it says "verification failed, Pls. check your details & try again"."
Tagging the Prime Minister and the Education Minister, Shankar Raj wrote on X: "Gives login request expired 401 authentication failed each time why? @dpradhanbjp @iitmadras @narendramodi @PMOIndia seriously, what is going on ? Dear Sir, sit with 2 students and try signing in and filling the revaluation details yourself to know the pain."
Another student said he had been trying to log in to the portal since 5 am.
Technical experts from IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur were roped in by the Education Ministry to assist the CBSE in identifying glitches in the OSM and support the re-evaluation process.