The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has begun its pre-examination preparations for the 2027 Class 10 and Class 12 board examinations, even as the date sheet for the upcoming exams is yet to be released. The Board has initiated the process of finalising candidate data and has invited bids for scanning and processing “flying slips” containing details of students appearing for the examinations.The timeline followed by CBSE last year provides an indication of when students could expect the 2027 date sheet. For the 2026 board examinations, CBSE released a tentative date sheet on September 24, 2025, for the first time. The Board said this was done 146 days before the examinations to give students, schools and teachers sufficient time to plan.The final schedule was released on October 30, 2025, 110 days before the examinations. CBSE had already announced that the 2026 Class 10 and 12 board exams would begin on February 17, 2026. The final date sheet also took into account subject combinations, entrance examination schedules and the need to provide sufficient gaps between papers.The 2026 schedule, however, was subsequently changed. On December 30, 2025, CBSE announced that papers scheduled for March 3 would be postponed. The affected Class 10 paper was moved to March 11, while the Class 12 Legal Studies paper was shifted to April 10.Stage2026 board examsTentative date sheetSeptember 24, 2025Final date sheetOctober 30, 2025Exam commencementFebruary 17, 2026Subsequent revisionDecember 30, 2025For the 2027 examinations, CBSE has not yet announced a date sheet or confirmed the examination commencement date. If the Board follows the pattern adopted last year, a tentative schedule could be expected around late September, followed by the final date sheet in October. However, these are only indications based on the previous cycle and are not dates announced by CBSE.The Board, according to an Indian Express report, is already working on the administrative groundwork for the next examination cycle. As part of this, it is seeking an agency to scan “flying slips” containing candidates’ names, identification numbers, roll numbers, centre numbers and subject codes using ICR, OCR and OMR technologies. The information will be matched against CBSE’s admission master and checked for errors or duplicate entries.The tender documents indicate that around 29.89 lakh candidates from Classes 10 and 12 are expected to appear for the 2027-28 examinations across 24 regional offices. The Board has said that pre-examination activities have increasingly been digitised because of the scale of the examinations and the possibility of errors in manual processing.