The policy is
a hundred pages.
The period is forty minutes.
Most CBSE schools broadly agree with NEP 2020 and are quietly stuck on making it the way the school actually runs. The honest summary: the policy changed three things a school can put its hands on. Everything else flows from those three.
the three that
change Monday →
What actually changes a teacher’s week.
We are opinionated about which parts of the policy are load-bearing for daily work and which are framing. These three are load-bearing.
A Class 9 Science teacher does the same things in a NEP-aligned workflow that she did in a marks-only one; the difference is downstream. Each test item is already competency-tagged, so the mark she records is also a data point on a competency map, with no second register. When NEP-aligned tools double a teacher’s workload, it is almost always because the school is running two systems in parallel: the old register and a new HPC workbook.
NEP and CBSE are not in tension.
CBSE remained the operative rulebook through the rollout. What NEP changed is what surrounds the numbers.
Keeps What CBSE keeps
- Marks out of 100: the 80-mark examination plus the 20-mark Internal Assessment.
- The 9-point grading scale for Classes 10 and 12.
- CGPA from the five main subjects, and the ×9.5 indicative percentage.
- Board examinations, blueprints and the section pattern A–E.
Changed What NEP changed around it
- The competency map every mark sits on, drawn from published learning outcomes.
- The report card that presents the numbers: the HPC, alongside the marks card.
- The cadence at which signal reaches the parent: steady and low-stakes, not one loaded PTM.
- The stakes for the youngest classes: formative observation, not examinations.
The rulebook side (IA components, best-2-of-3, CGPA) is worked interactively on the grading page and written up in the IA guide and the CGPA guide.
What we deliberately did not build.
Relearns is not a generic ERP. There is no admissions module, no fee receipt, no bus tracking.
We wanted the assessment, reporting and teaching surface to be excellent in a CBSE NEP context, and that meant refusing to dilute the product into a thirty-feature catalogue. Schools that need fee software run it next to Relearns; that is fine. What you should not have to do is buy a generic ERP that adds an “HPC tab” in v3 and discover at term-end that nothing actually flows through it.
NEP 2020, answered.
Is "NEP-aligned" a real product change or marketing?
It is a real product change when the data model knows about competencies, the report card produced by the system is the Holistic Progress Card (not a marks-only sheet bolted next to one), and assessment generation respects the CBSE 2026–27 blueprint with its 40–50% competency-based weighting. Most "NEP-aligned" school software is a labelling exercise on a generic ERP. Ours is not.
Does Relearns replace the marks card with the HPC?
No, and that is deliberate. CBSE still issues marks, CGPA and an indicative percentage for Classes 10 and 12, and parents still want to see them. The HPC sits alongside the marks card and adds the multidimensional, narrative and 360-degree view that NEP 2020 introduced. Both layers come out of the same data your teachers already enter.
What does NEP look like for primary classes?
Classes 1 to 8 use a lighter assessment cadence centred on observable competencies and qualitative notes. The HPC has stage-specific templates (Foundational, Preparatory, Middle, Secondary) authored by PARAKH; we follow them rather than forcing a Secondary-style marksheet onto a Class 3 child.
How does Relearns handle competency-based assessment?
Every Periodic Test and Internal Assessment item is tagged to the competencies it targets, drawn from the CBSE learning-outcomes lists. The teacher does not have to maintain a parallel competency register: the same marks entry feeds both the scholastic side and the competency view inside the HPC.
What about computational thinking: separate subject or woven in?
Woven through subjects, the way the NCF-SE describes it. A Class 7 Science chapter on simple machines includes the decomposition and abstraction patterns; a Class 9 Maths chapter on coordinate geometry surfaces the algorithmic thinking implicit in the proofs. We do not treat CT as a column in a spreadsheet.
See the policy running, not described.
Thirty minutes on a live workspace: a competency-tagged Periodic Test, the marks entering once, and the HPC deriving at the end. Bring the person on your team who is most sceptical of NEP tooling.