Central Board of Secondary Education
CBSE, Classes 6 to 10 — a student's map
CBSE runs the national school curriculum built on NCERT textbooks. In Class 10 each subject is 80 marks written plus 20 internal, with 33% to pass and roughly half the paper competency-based. NCERT also rewrote the Class 9 books for 2026–27. Everything below is free to read.
- Classes covered
- 6–10
- Class 10 subject
- 80 + 20
- Ready lessons
- 1,815
- Practice bank
- ~600,000 questions
The thing most CBSE pages have not caught up with
NCERT replaced the Class 9 Mathematics, Science and Social Science textbooks for 2026–27. New chapters, new order, new names — Class 9 Maths went from fifteen chapters to eight. A very large number of study sites still publish the old chapter list, which is why searching an old chapter name now returns confident, wrong answers. Our Class 9 pages use the new books.
Start here
How CBSE marks a subject
Every Class 10 subject totals 100 marks: a 80-mark board paper written in 3 hours, plus 20 marks of internal assessment your school awards across the year. You need 33% and you must clear both parts. The internal marks are the ones students forget are on the certificate until it is too late to earn them.
CBSE — common questions
- How many marks is the CBSE Class 10 board paper out of?
- Each subject is out of 100 marks: an 80-mark written board paper plus 20 marks of internal assessment awarded by the school. You need 33% to pass, and you must pass the theory and internal components.
- How long is a CBSE Class 10 exam?
- Three hours of writing time, with 15 minutes of reading time before the paper starts. Use the reading time to pick which optional questions you will attempt.
- What is the Class 10 two-phase board exam?
- Phase 1 in February is compulsory and is the main board examination. Phase 2 in May is optional — a candidate may retake selected subjects to improve, on the same syllabus and the same marking scheme. The better score counts.
- How much of the paper is competency-based?
- About half. CBSE builds roughly 50% of the paper from competency-based questions (case studies, application and reasoning), 20% from objective questions including assertion–reason, and 30% from short and long answer questions.