How does India mark Exam season?
सीबीएसई बोर्ड परीक्षा (Senior School Certificate Examination)
- Local date
- February 17, 2027–April 10, 2027
- When is it?
- From mid-February to early April, tests are held separately for each subject; the dates are announced in CBSE's date sheet.
India's Central Board of Secondary Education runs the Senior School Certificate Examination for Class XII in the opposite manner to most of the others: not compressed into a day or two but dispersed subject by subject across nearly two months. The 2026 schedule ran from February 17 to April 10, with one or several papers on a given day. India also has separate national professional entrance exams — JEE for engineering, NEET for medicine — conducted by the NTA on their own calendar. So an Indian candidate faces not one great examination but a stretch of weeks in which any day may carry a paper, followed by a second round of professional tests. The pressure is shaped as a long plateau rather than a spike.
What is this topic?
Every country here runs a national test that decides university places, but how tightly that decision is compressed varies enormously. China squeezes it into two days, June 7 and 8. Brazil does the opposite, spreading it across two Sundays a week apart in November. India goes further still, dispersing subject papers across nearly two months. Japan and Taiwan run a two-stage system: one national test, then each university's own. The United States is the only place with no national entrance exam at all. The same question — how an eighteen-year-old should be measured — gets seven different answers.
Sources and dates
Dates follow local time zones, calendars, and official notices. Check the source when a date is estimated or locally variable.