School education boards from 27 states have completed training to set 'competency-based' question paper templates — a new structure for creating question papers for Classes X and XII, which is expected to be implemented beginning with the 2026-27 academic year.
PARAKH, the National Council of Educational Research and Training's (NCERT) national assessment centre, has been organising workshops on Setting Balanced Question Papers for Promoting Equivalence in School State Boards for the past year.
In addition to state boards, training was provided for the Central Board for Secondary Education (CBSE), which oversees over 27,000 schools across the country, including Kendriya Vidyalayas, Navodaya Vidyalayas, and private schools, News18 reports.
PARAKH (Performance Assessment, Review, and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development), an NCERT constituent unit, is entrusted with developing standards and procedures for student assessment and evaluation for all approved school boards in India.
The Centre has been working to standardise all school education boards under the new National Education Policy (NEP) for 2020.
This evaluation method, developed as part of the Equivalence of School Board programme, is consistent with the NEP's vision for a competency-based education model.
The list also includes numerous opposition-ruled states that have been heavily critical of the NEP. Some of these states, like Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, are in the process of developing their state education plans for both secondary and higher education.
Education is a subject on the concurrent list, therefore states are not required to obey Union government directions.
However, officials at the national assessment centre stated that all of these "state boards have been in sync with them on the idea of equivalence".
According to Prof Indrani Bhaduri, CEO of PARAKH, the series of seminars aimed to standardise question paper templates and improve the capacity of question paper setters from different boards.
Currently, only a few boards include competency-based questions in their papers. For example, CBSE has implemented a 10 per cent weightage for such questions in Classes X and XII.
