NEW DELHI, October 8 — The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) on Thursday notified an updated assessment framework and examination blueprint for the Class 10 and Class 12 board examinations for the academic session 2026-27, aligning nationwide secondary schooling evaluation with the pedagogical goals of the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020).
Under the official circular issued by the CBSE Examination Controller, the weightage of Competency-Based Questions—incorporating Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs), real-world case-based inquiries, source-integrated data analysis, and assertion-reasoning problems—has been augmented to 50 percent of total marks. Traditional short-answer and long-answer descriptive questions have been scaled down to 30 percent, with the remaining 20 percent designated for standard objective questions.
The board also mandated digital logbooks and QR-code-authenticated marks submission for practicals and continuous internal assessments to eliminate subjective grade inflation. Furthermore, CBSE released operational guidelines for the proposed dual-board examination model designed to alleviate high-stakes examination anxiety by affording students an opportunity to retain their best performance across two annual testing sessions.
Educational reforms under NEP 2020, the National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCF-SE 2023), the institutional role of PARAKH (Performance Assessment, Review, and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development), and constitutional provisions concerning education (Article 21A, 86th Constitutional Amendment) are vital for UPSC Civil Services (GS-II: Social Justice & Education) and teaching recruitment examinations (CTET, KVS, NVS, State TETs).