CBSE Competency-Based Questions: A Weekly Practice Plan

Competency-based questions ask you to use a concept on something you have not seen before: a passage, a historical source, a table, a graph or an everyday situation. CBSE's 2026-27 Secondary curriculum says that presently about half of the questions are competency-focused, so they now deserve a fixed weekly slot of their own. A workable plan is six to eight such questions per subject per week from November, timed from about week six, and marked against CBSE's marking scheme every time.

The problem most students describe is not that these questions are hard. It is that they "knew the chapter" and still dropped marks, because the paper never asked them to state what they knew. It asked them to spot which idea a situation needed, read a table correctly, or argue from a source. Those are trainable skills, but only by doing them, not by rereading.

The "where you are likely to meet it" column is a guide, not a CBSE rule. Check your own subject's current sample paper to see which types it uses.

What are competency-based questions in CBSE?

They are questions that test whether you can apply a concept, not just recall it. CBSE's Secondary curriculum for 2026-27 describes them as case-based, source-based, integrated, data interpretation, situational and application-oriented questions, and says that presently approximately 50% of the questions are competency-focused. The rest are MCQs and short or long answer questions.

Two details in that wording matter. First, "approximately" and "presently": the curriculum says the split may be reviewed periodically, so treat "about half" as the planning figure, not an exact count. Second, it is a share of questions, not of marks. How many marks those questions carry in your paper depends on the subject, which is why the most useful ten minutes you can spend this week is counting them in your subject's sample paper on CBSE Academic.

Most subjects in Classes 9 and 10 carry 80 marks of theory and 20 of internal assessment, according to the same curriculum document, so the competency questions sit inside that 80-mark written paper.

How are they different from ordinary textbook questions?

They add three loads that a textbook question does not: reading, transfer and choice. A textbook question names the concept for you. A competency question describes a situation and leaves you to work out which concept it needs.

Here is an illustration (written for this article, not taken from a CBSE paper). A textbook question asks: "State Ohm's law." A competency version gives you a short paragraph about a phone charger, a table of voltages and currents measured at home, and asks which reading looks wrong and why. You need Ohm's law in both. In the second, you must read the table, recognise that the ratio should be constant, find the reading that breaks it and explain it in a sentence.

That is why students who learn chapters by reading feel ambushed. Reading builds recognition: the feeling that a page is familiar. Competency questions require retrieval and transfer: pulling the idea out of memory unprompted and fitting it to new facts. The comparison of active recall and rereading explains the difference in detail, and the research is consistent on it. The review by Dunlosky and colleagues in 2013 (summary) rated practice testing as a high-utility technique and rereading as low-utility, and Roediger and Karpicke (2006, study) found that retrieval practice beat restudying for retention after a delay.

How much time should a competency question take in the exam?

About 2.25 minutes per mark in an 80-mark, three-hour paper, because 180 minutes divided by 80 marks is 2.25. A 4-mark case-based question is therefore worth roughly nine minutes, and two to three of those minutes will go on reading.

Now scale it up. Suppose, purely as an illustration, that competency-focused questions carry 40 of the 80 marks in one of your papers. That is 90 minutes of the exam spent on questions that begin with reading. Students who have only practised short recall questions often finish those 90 minutes 20 or 30 minutes late, and the time comes out of the long answers at the end.

Count your own figure from the sample paper rather than trusting the illustration. Then set a per-question budget and practise to it. The guide to exam time management for speed and accuracy has a simple skip rule that works well here: when a question passes its budget, answer what you can, mark it, and come back once the rest of the paper is done.

What drill works for each question type?

Each type has a specific failure point, and the drill should target that point rather than general "practice". Use the table below as a menu, and pick the two or three types your weakest subject uses most.

The weekly counts are estimates to calibrate. If a set takes much longer than planned, cut the count before you cut the marking, because the marking is where you learn what the examiner wanted.

How should each subject practise them?

By the question types it actually uses, which differ more than students expect.

Maths. Case-based questions here usually wrap a familiar method (an equation, a ratio, a probability) inside a story. The skill is translation: turning the story into an equation before solving. Drill this by writing the equation and stopping, for five cases in a row, then solving them all. You learn to translate quickly without the distraction of the arithmetic.

Science. Expect cases built on experiments, everyday devices and data from observations. The drill is to name the concept in the margin before you answer ("this is about refraction", "this is about a displacement reaction"). Most lost marks in Science cases are a wrong concept, not a wrong calculation. Diagrams and labelled steps still earn marks inside case questions, so do not abandon them just because the question starts with a paragraph. The Class 10 Science chapter-wise plan shows where to fit these drills around chapter coverage.

Social Science. Source-based questions reward reading the extract and quoting from it. The most common error is writing everything you know about the topic and never referring to the source. Practise answering with one phrase from the source in every answer. Map work and data from tables (for example, in Economics chapters) belong to the data-interpretation drill.

Languages. Unseen passages, case-based passages and situational writing tasks all test reading speed and the ability to answer what is asked. A ten-minute daily reading habit, plus one timed passage a week, does more here than an extra grammar worksheet.

What does a 12-week practice plan look like?

It moves from untimed accuracy to timed mixed sets, then into full sample papers, with roughly five hours a week of competency practice once it is running. Starting in early October, twelve weeks takes you to the end of December, which leaves January for pre-boards and full papers.

The hours, as an estimate for a student taking four main subjects: six questions per subject per week, four subjects, about nine minutes each, is 216 minutes, or 3.6 hours. Add about 1.5 hours of marking and error logging and you reach roughly five hours a week. If you study 15 to 18 hours a week in total, that is a little under a third of your time, which is reasonable when about half the questions in the paper are of this kind.

The mixing in weeks 7 to 9 is deliberate. Integrated questions punish students who only ever practise one chapter at a time, because the exam does not tell you which chapter a question belongs to. The guide to interleaving practice shows how to build mixed sets without them becoming chaotic.

Do not wait for "syllabus completion" to start. Begin with chapters you have already finished in class, and add each new chapter to the pool as soon as it is done. Fit the slots into a Class 10 timetable that respects school and tuition hours rather than adding them on top of an already full evening.

How do you mark your own answers against the marking scheme?

Mark every set against CBSE's published marking scheme for the sample paper, line by line, and record which value points or steps you missed. Self-marking only helps if it is strict.

For each answer, check three things:

1. Did I answer every sub-part? Case-based questions often split 4 marks into 1 + 1 + 2. Missing the last sub-part costs half the question.
2. Did I include the value points the scheme lists? Many answers that "feel right" miss one keyword or one step the scheme gives a mark for.
3. Did I use the case, source or data? If your answer could have been written without reading the passage, it probably missed the point of the question.

The guide to revising with mark schemes goes further on step marks and command words. For full-paper practice, the CBSE sample paper practice schedule shows how to space papers from October to the exams so each one gets marked properly.

Where do you find good competency questions?

Start with CBSE's own sample question papers and marking schemes for 2026-27, which are published on CBSE Academic, because they show the current design. Then extend them in two ways.

First, use earlier years' sample papers for the same subject, checking that the chapters are still in your syllabus. Second, make your own: take an NCERT solved example or activity and change its setting. A refraction example becomes a question about a swimming pool; a chapter on money and credit becomes a short case about a family borrowing from two sources. Writing a question forces you to decide what concept it tests, which is the exact skill the exam rewards.

Be selective with large commercial question collections. They are useful for volume, but quality varies, and a question that only wraps recall in a paragraph trains reading, not application.

How can you schedule this practice in MyStudyPlanner?

MyStudyPlanner has no CBSE template or question bank, so you would choose the "Other" category, add your subjects manually and set your daily study window around school hours. To give competency practice a fixed place, you can add a short custom task each day or add a mock-test set placed after each subject completes, and set subject priority to High for the subject whose cases cost you most, which gives it more sessions in each cycle. Each study session also gets brief revision tasks one, three, seven and fourteen days later if the day has room, which suits the idea of returning to a chapter through new questions. The questions themselves, and the marking, come from CBSE's sample papers and your own error log.

What if you keep losing marks on case-based questions?

Diagnose which of three failures it is, because each needs a different fix. Take your last ten lost marks on competency questions and sort them.

• Reading failure. You misread a number, a negative, a unit or which row of a table was meant. Fix: underline givens before answering and summarise tables aloud in one sentence.
• Concept-choice failure. You applied the wrong idea. Fix: the margin drill, naming the concept before writing anything, for two weeks.
• Framing failure. You knew it, but the answer lacked the steps or keywords the scheme rewards, or ignored the source. Fix: strict marking-scheme comparison and rewriting one answer per day in full.

If most failures are concept-choice in one chapter, the problem is the chapter, not the question type. Go back to NCERT for that chapter, work its exercises, and check you can explain it aloud in plain words, without the book, before returning to cases.

What changes for Class 9 and Class 12 students?

For Class 9 in 2026-27, the new internal assessment model requires schools to hold three periodic assessments in the year, average the best two, and make at least one of them competency-based, according to the same curriculum document. The optional Advanced papers in Maths and Science, which are school-based in Class 9 for 2026-27, are made up entirely of higher-order questions. So the drills above are useful from Class 9 onwards, not just in the board year.

For Class 12, the "about half" figure in this article comes from the Secondary (Class 9 and 10) curriculum. Open the 2026-27 Class 12 sample paper for each of your subjects on CBSE Academic and count the case-based and source-based questions yourself before deciding how much weekly time they need.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are competency-based questions in CBSE?

They are questions that ask you to apply a concept to a new situation rather than reproduce it. CBSE's 2026-27 curriculum lists them as case-based, source-based, integrated, data interpretation, situational and application-oriented questions. You usually read a passage, source, table or scenario first, then answer parts that test whether you can use what you learnt, not just recall it.

How many competency-based questions come in the CBSE Class 10 board exam?

CBSE's 2026-27 Secondary curriculum says that presently about half of the questions are competency-focused, with the rest being MCQs and short or long answers. It also says the split may be reviewed periodically. For the exact count and marks in your subject, open the current sample paper on CBSE Academic and tally the case-based and source-based items yourself.

How do I prepare for case-based questions in Class 10?

Finish the NCERT chapter and its exercises first, then practise case-based sets weekly: read the passage once, underline the numbers and claims, answer each part, and mark yourself against the marking scheme. Six to eight questions per subject per week from November is a workable starting load. Reading more theory does not substitute for answering unfamiliar cases.

Is NCERT enough for competency-based questions?

NCERT is enough for the concepts, because competency questions test NCERT ideas in unfamiliar settings. It is not enough on its own for the skill of applying them under time. Add CBSE's sample papers and marking schemes, rewrite NCERT examples into new contexts yourself, and practise reading a passage or table quickly before deciding which concept it is really asking about.

How much time should I spend on a case-based question in the exam?

In an 80-mark, three-hour paper you have about 2.25 minutes per mark, so a 4-mark case-based question is worth roughly nine minutes, including two to three minutes of reading. Practise to that budget from about the sixth week of your plan. If a question runs well over, answer the parts you can, mark it, and return to it after finishing the paper.

Why do I lose marks on case-based questions even when I know the chapter?

Usually for one of three reasons: you misread what the passage or table actually says, you picked the wrong concept for the situation, or you knew the answer but wrote it without the steps or keywords the marking scheme rewards. Sort each lost mark into one of those three, because each needs a different drill. Rereading the chapter fixes none of them.

Your next step

Download your weakest subject's 2026-27 sample paper and marking scheme from CBSE Academic, and spend 20 minutes counting its competency-focused questions and their marks. Then attempt three of them untimed, mark them strictly against the scheme, and write down which of the three failures cost you each mark. That tally decides your first two weeks of drills.