The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) is preparing to launch a digital platform designed to support competency-based assessments aligned with the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020).
The platform will enable teachers across more than 27,000 CBSE-affiliated schools to design, share and evaluate high-quality assessments that stress critical thinking, problem-solving and analytical skills rather than rote memorisation.
Under the overhaul, the board has already begun reshaping board exam papers for Classes 10 and 12, with nearly half the questions now being competency-based. For younger learners in grades 3, 5 and 8, CBSE is using the SAFAL programme (Structured Assessment for Analysing Learning) to identify learning gaps early and recommend corrective strategies.
To institutionalise the reform, CBSE’s Centre of Excellence in Assessment (CEA) is working to build a national-level question bank and set new assessment standards focused on higher-order thinking.
The digital platform, currently in its RFP phase, is envisaged as an AI-powered centralised system. Features will include a drag-and-drop question-builder, metadata tagging of questions (grade, subject, learning outcome, Bloom’s taxonomy level), plagiarism detection, real-time dashboards for assessment quality and integration with teacher-training systems.
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The move is timely: in an era where education is rapidly shifting toward skills, diagnostics, and learning outcomes, the new platform could help bridge the gap between policy intent and classroom reality. As one CBSE official noted: “Assessments should not merely test memory but evaluate how students think, reason, and apply knowledge.”
With implementation ahead, schools and teachers will need to prepare for changes in assessment design, teacher training and use of data analytics to guide teaching and learning. The platform signals CBSE’s push to make assessment a tool for learning improvement and not just a certification exercise.
