NEW DELHI, June 12 -- Vedant Srivastava posted the evidence himself: scanned answer sheets, returned for re-evaluation, that did not match the pages he had written. "I studied for an entire year. I sacrificed sleep, peace of mind, outings, everything for these exams," he wrote, and thirteen thousand shares later the Central Board of Secondary Education was manually rechecking his paper and discovering he was right.

The republic's exam auditors, it turns out, are three teenagers.

Srivastava supplied the proof. Sarthak Sidhant, an 18-year-old in Ranchi, supplied the paper trail, publishing an investigation arguing the board had "deliberately played with students' futures by rewriting its own rulebook" as its new digital marking system buc...