The Central Board of Secondary Education has released the first official Sample Question Paper for the Class 12 Artificial Intelligence examination, offering students a clear preview of what to expect in the 2026 board exam scheduled for March 24. The paper, designed for the 2025–26 academic session, focuses on grounding learners in both foundational AI knowledge and essential workplace skills, ensuring they are better prepared for a rapidly expanding AI-driven world.
The 50-mark, two-hour exam is structured into two major sections. The first section evaluates employability skills, ranging from communication and self-management to entrepreneurship, ICT and environmental awareness. It features a mix of objective and short answers, encouraging students to demonstrate clarity of thought and practical understanding rather than memorised responses.
The second, more extensive section tests subject-specific AI skills and includes objective, short-answer and descriptive questions that examine how well students understand AI concepts and their real-world applications. Core areas such as the AI model life cycle, problem-scoping, data storytelling and capstone project components receive significant weightage. Students are expected to compute loss functions like RMSE and MSE, compare cross-validation with train-test splits, apply regression concepts and interpret data-driven scenarios.
The sample paper also integrates visual cues, diagrams and icons to reflect the industry’s increasing reliance on graphical representations of processes, from data pipelines to storytelling frameworks. Officials noted that the design intent was to make the paper application-oriented, encouraging students to think like AI practitioners who can interpret datasets, evaluate models and communicate insights meaningfully. References to tools such as Scikit-Learn and DataRobot ground the content in practical exposure familiar to modern learners.
CBSE has advised students to download the official PDF from the board’s academic website and begin practicing early, as the sample paper mirrors the exact blueprint and difficulty level expected in the final board exam. For many students, this release marks the starting point of their preparation strategy, giving them a structured roadmap to navigate one of the most dynamic and in-demand subjects in the current curriculum.
