Assessment for achievement: How PARAKH measures What Matters in Indian Education
The Indian education system is undergoing a profound transformation, spearheaded by the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. Central to this reform is the establishment of PARAKH, or Performance Assessment, Review, and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development. It was launched as an independent unit under NCERT in 2023 with the support of the Ministry of Education and the World Bank’s STARS project. It is India’s first-ever National Assessment Centre mandated to set norms, standards, and guidelines for student assessment across all recognised school boards in the country.
Its mandate is both regulatory and advisory: to develop assessment frameworks, prescribe good practice for examinations and evaluations, support boards and state agencies in designing competency-based assessments, and to conduct periodic large-scale surveys of learning outcomes that furnish policy-relevant evidence about system performance. The initiative also focuses on ensuring the equivalence of School Boards and developing the much-anticipated Holistic Progress Cards (HPC) for all stages of school education.
PARAKH does not merely test students; it tests the health of the entire education system, assessing how effectively policies, curriculum, pedagogy, and school environments are enabling learning and whether the promise of NEP has begun to translate into real, measurable progress in classrooms across India. Hence, PARAKH stands at the vanguard of India’s educational renaissance, a beacon that challenges conventional thinking and awakens the nation to the transformative power of meaningful assessment. In essence, PARAKH acts as a mirror of the education system, reflecting whether the transformative intent of NEP 2020, to shift from rote-based learning to competency-based education, has translated into tangible improvement in learning outcomes at the ground level.
The necessity of PARAKH is inextricably linked to the mandates of the NEP 2020 and the subsequent NCF-School Education, 2023. NEP called for an independent national assessment centre to provide uniform benchmarks and support the transition to competency-based education (CBE). After NEP’s adoption, large parts of India’s assessment ecosystem, with multiple boards, differing exam designs, and an entrenched culture of high-stakes terminal testing, required systemic realignment so that curricular aims and assessment practices were mutually reinforcing. PARAKH operationalises NEP’s vision across an extensive, diverse school system and serves as the institutional mechanism for enforcing this paradigm.
To appreciate the gravity of this shift, it is crucial to highlight the granular differences between PARAKH’s approach and the erstwhile National Achievement Survey (NAS), which PARAKH’s own large-scale survey, the PARAKH Rashtriya Sarvekshan (PRS), now supersedes. The NAS, while valuable, was primarily a diagnostic tool conducted every three years to measure discrete subject proficiency at sampled grades (3, 5, 8, 10) on mainly content-aligned test items. PRS reframes assessment at the learning-stage level (foundational, preparatory, middle), reduces grade overlap, and emphasises competencies rather than coverage of curriculum content alone. PARAKH places greater emphasis on system-level diagnostics, assessing schools and subpopulations, collecting richer contextual data and aligning item design to competency frameworks derived from the NCFs. Operationally, PARAKH adopts newer sampling and administration protocols, uses mixed modes of data collection (OMR, digital tools, structured observations) and publishes more granular reports aimed at actionable reform rather than merely ranking.
NAS was often perceived as a point-in-time test; the PRS differentiates itself by adopting a more advanced, system-level evaluation approach, often employing sophisticated statistical models such as Item Response Theory (IRT) and Balanced Incomplete Block (BIB) design. This methodological rigour ensures higher accuracy, reliability, and comparability across diverse student populations. Furthermore, unlike NAS, which provided broad achievement data, PARAKH is tasked with developing Holistic Progress Cards, a 360-degree assessment tool that goes beyond cognitive domains to include co-curricular, vocational, and socio-emotional learning, thereby truly embodying the holistic goal that NAS did not structurally address.
Methodologically, PARAKH follows contemporary principles of large-scale assessment while tailoring instruments to India’s curricular aims. The core mechanism is the establishment of a national assessment framework that ensures equivalence across India’s sixty-plus school boards. The data collected is contextual and essential for multivariate analysis, allowing policymakers to identify the influence of variables such as teacher preparedness, infrastructure, and socio-economic background on student performance. Psychometric procedures, including item calibration, reliability checks, differential item functioning analysis, and scaling, are used to construct comparable proficiency estimates. Results are reported at multiple levels (national, state, district, school-type and subgroup) with diagnostic breakdowns of competencies and suggestions for remedial action. PARAKH’s operational and training manuals set out these processes in detail to safeguard validity, reliability and fairness.
International alignment is an explicit aspiration. PARAKH designers have benchmarked national instruments against the characteristics of large-scale global assessments such as the OECD’s PISA and the U.S. NAEP, particularly in shifting toward application-focused tasks, robust sampling and system-level diagnostics. In comparison, PISA is a triennial study that evaluates 15-year-olds’ ability to apply reading, mathematics and science in real-world contexts. PARAKH seeks construct and methodological consonance with international practice, task complexity, cognitive demand, representative sampling and transparent reporting, while keeping content and developmental expectations grounded in India’s NCFs.
PISA is globally recognised because it tests students’ ability to apply knowledge to real-life situations, which is precisely the competency-based shift mandated by NEP 2020. This alignment serves two purposes: first, it provides international benchmarking, allowing India to gauge its educational effectiveness against global peers; and second, it forces the entire system, from curriculum design to classroom pedagogy, to internalise the principles of a future-ready, application-oriented education. Future plans for PARAKH include explicit integration with global assessments by 2026, solidifying its role as the national interface for international educational performance audits.
The utility of PARAKH lies in its potential to be an engine of reform rather than a box-checking exercise. By producing reliable, stage-aligned data on where learners are, and by diagnosing competence gaps by domain and region, PARAKH can inform targeted curriculum revision, teacher training priorities, resource allocation, and pedagogical shifts toward competency-based teaching methods. It is designed to be the foundational engine for ushering in systemic changes in the Indian school education landscape.
The best way to use this system is to treat its findings as a diagnostic tool. The data generated must lead to targeted, evidence-based interventions, embedding its findings into state and district planning cycles: aligning in-service teacher professional development to observed competency shortfalls; reorienting assessment practice at board and school levels toward periodic formative checks; using school-level diagnostic profiles to design remedial cohorts; and instituting evidence-based accountability that rewards improvement in learning processes, not solely test scores.
Equally important is capacity building, helping SCERTs, DIETs and teachers interpret and act on PARAKH outputs so that measurement becomes a tool for learning improvement. SCERTs must use the competency analysis to reform state-specific curricula and teacher development programs. Teachers must adjust their classroom pedagogy, shifting from lecture-based teaching to experiential and enquiry-based learning.
In sum, PARAKH is not simply “a new survey” but a structural pivot in India’s assessment architecture: it codifies standards, retools large-scale assessment to align with NEP’s competency agenda, and provides system-level diagnostics with the explicit aim of catalysing improved teaching and learning. Policymakers must couple robust measurement with sustained capacity building, curriculum–assessment coherence at the board and classroom levels. Done well, PARAKH can be the hinge between NEP’s aspirations and the everyday reality of classrooms across India.
