CBSE Class 12 board exam paper has a 20-year-old meme in a QR code: What is the ‘rickroll’?

Students in the 12th grade took to social media on Monday (March 9) to share copies of their annual Mathematics exam paper administered by the CBSE, featuring an innocuous-looking QR code. Scanning it led to what has been described as the “gold standard of internet mischief” – the rickroll. > In today’s episode of how serious our examination conducting authorities are- presenting to you CBSE class 12th board maths paper which has a QR code that opens rickroll’s song on YouTube 🤷🏿‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/gvQcsVvGVp — Nehr_who? (@Nher_who) March 9, 2026 In today’s episode of how serious our examination conducting authorities are- presenting to you CBSE class 12th board maths paper which has a QR code that opens rickroll’s song on YouTube 🤷🏿‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/gvQcsVvGVp — Nehr_who? (@Nher_who) March 9, 2026 The CBSE has included QR codes in recent years to verify the authenticity of question papers and identify sources of potential paper leaks. In a statement on Tuesday, the board said that some sets of the Math question paper featured the QR codes, and verified that the question papers were genuine.“It is hereby confirmed by the Board that the question papers are genuine. The security of the question papers remains uncompromised.” ## What exactly is the rickroll? The rick-roll is a meme that originated in 2006 or 2007 on internet forums, specifically a relatively wholesome area of the 4chan website. The prank itself is a bait-and-switch: users click on a link only to open the music video for the 1987 pop hit, Never Gonna Give You Up. The prank is named after its singer, Rick Astley. The song opens with a visual of a red-haired, boyish-looking Brit grooving around a standing microphone, as the synths make way for what has now become an iconic meme. How did the meme originate? The rick-roll evolved from the “duck-rolling,” which was popular on 4chan in 2006. Website moderator Christopher Poole, who went by “moot”, introduced a command to replace the word egg with duck as a joke. Not long after, users in a 4chan forum introduced an edited image of a duck on wheels, calling it duckroll. This was the original bait-and-switch, with forum users clicking a disguised hyperlink, clearly not expecting to see the wheeled duck. In 2007, just as the duck-roll meme caught on, one user replaced the image with that of the boyish-looking Astley dancing in a trench coat. Before long, this was replaced with a link to the music video. Video company ECG Productions recalled that the first major rickroll used a fake link advertised as a trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV, leading viewers instead to the music video. Legacy of the meme The meme, and its absolutely bizarre ability to induce laughter 20 years on, has had one clear winner – Astley himself. After an initial ambivalence to the trend, he leaned into the joke in 2008, performing the song at a Thanksgiving parade. Where one expected a musical surprise as part of a float featuring characters from the Cartoon Network programme, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, Astley arose from the structure. Over the following years, he has leaned into this prank on multiple occasions. The continued success of the song decades on led to his emerging 23 years on from retirement in 2016 with a new album titled “50”. He performed at the Glastonbury Festival in 2023 and released a memoir titled Never: The Autobiography in 2024. Today, the original music video for Never Gonna Give You Up has 1.7 billion views on YouTube, a success unmatched by his other ‘80s hits such as She Wants to Dance With Me, Together Forever, and It Would Take a Strong Strong Man.