Last updated:November 15, 2024, 11:58 AM IST

PARAKH, the National Assessment Center under NCERT, has identified and trained faculty for each of the 34 state school boards who will be ‘master trainers’ for their respective boards

The assessment system, under the wider ‘Equivalence of School Boards’ initiative, is in line with the new National Education Policy (NEP), 2020. (Getty Image for Representation)

School education boards across the country are working on and are likely to introduce the new question paper template for Class 10 and 12, developed by professional paper setters, from the 2025-2026 academic session, News18 has learnt.

PARAKH, the national assessment center under the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), has identified and trained faculty for each of the 34 state school boards who will be ‘master trainers’ for their respective boards and in turn will train teachers to develop a cadre of paper typesetters for the school boards.

The assessment center has prepared a module and formulated guidelines to develop a cadre of professional paper setters, full-time teachers who are currently being trained in designing and balancing question papers, starting from classes 10 and 12, it is learnt.

The training will be provided through the various State Councils of Educational Research and Training (SCERT).

PARAKH (Performance Assessment, Review and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development), a unit of NCERT, is tasked with setting standards and guidelines for student assessment and evaluation for all recognized school education boards in India.

The Center has focused on standardizing all school education boards in line with the NEP. Since education is a subject in the ‘concurrent’ list, states are not bound to follow the directives of the Union government.

The assessment system, under the wider ‘Equivalence of School Boards’ initiative, is in line with the new National Education Policy (NEP), 2020, which envisages a competency-based model of education, where assessment is integrated into the learning process.

In July this year, PARAKH had submitted the report “Establishing Equivalence Across School Boards” to the Union Ministry of Education (MoE). One of the key recommendations of the report, in addition to proposing a cumulative system of assessment for grades 9 through 12, was that all state school boards develop a cadre of “professional paper setters” to standardize the assessments in the senior grades.

A report released by the MoE in August also showed that more students from state school boards failed Class 10 and 12 exams than those enrolled in central school boards.

According to Prof Indrani Bhaduri, CEO of PARAKH, all the 34 school boards are in sync with the equivalence recommendations and are preparing to train their faculty to develop their own cadre of paper setters by the end of the year. So far, all these boards are preparing to introduce the new question paper pattern from next year academic session for classes 10 and 12, which have board exams.

“We have conducted training workshops for each of these boards and now all these have a master trainer, who will further identify and train teachers for paper setting, which unlike the current practice is a technical exercise and requires a dedicated cadre trained in its methodology, the common drawing and marking scheme,” Prof Bhaduri said.

Previously, teachers with 8-10 years of experience would set question papers based on previous years’ question papers. But for a paper to be balanced, much more understanding, training and technique is required, she added.

The workshops focus on designing question papers that assess a full range of competencies, with practical sessions to unpack previous year’s question papers to understand the gaps and explore the importance of marking schemes emphasized in the National Curriculum Framework – for School Education (NCF-SE) 2023.

“Marking schemes are as important as the test items themselves. Participants entered into the ‘art of the mark’ and learned to balance scoring and question formats to truly reflect student understanding. When these officers return to their states, they are equipped with not only best practices but a framework that brings India’s boards closer to assessment equivalence – not by cloning, but by aligning standards to support equity and student mobility across regions, she says.

While some school boards, such as the Central Board of School Education (CBSE), have introduced a 10 percent weightage for competency-based questions for classes 11 and 12, not all boards have experimented with this, nor for all subjects. For the past three years, every year CBSE has increased the weightage of concept application questions by 10 per cent, up to a maximum of 50 per cent.

However, PARAKH recommends a completely competency-based questionnaire for the senior classes.