Holistic Progress Cards Powered by AI: Redefining How Indian Schools Evaluate Success
A few years from now, a parent–teacher meeting in a typical Indian school might look very different.
Instead of a thin paper report card with a few subject marks and a one-line remark, a parent sits down with a teacher in front of a shared screen. Together, they scroll through a digital profile that shows the child’s journey over the years: how reading fluency has grown, how often they helped classmates, where they struggled with self-confidence, what projects lit up their curiosity, how they handled setbacks, and how all of this is evolving over time.
On the side of the screen, an AI assistant quietly highlights patterns: “Mathematics problem-solving has improved sharply this term when activities are project-based”; “Peer feedback repeatedly mentions leadership in group tasks”; “Sleep and mood logs suggest dips before exams.” It has pulled these insights from classroom observations, project rubrics, self and peer assessments, and even short reflections the child recorded in their own words.
That is the world Holistic Progress Cards (HPCs), powered by AI and envisioned in NEP 2020, are nudging Indian schools towards.
This article explores how that shift from marksheets to multidimensional, AI-augmented progress cards can redefine what “success” means in Indian education and why it could ultimately shape employment and life chances in far more equitable ways than the current system ever has.
From marksheets to mirrors: why traditional report cards are no longer enough
For decades, Indian report cards have answered a narrow question: “How did this student perform in a few exams this year?” They do this reasonably well, but they fail on three fronts that matter deeply for the 21st century:
They compress a child’s complex growth into a few numbers and ranks.
They privilege exam performance over competencies like collaboration, resilience, or ethical judgment.
They provide little actionable insight for teachers, parents, or the students themselves.
NEP 2020 is explicit about this limitation. It calls for a move away from high-stakes, rote-driven exams and “traditional knowledge acquisition” towards competency-based education and assessment, and explicitly proposes a holistic, 360-degree progress card that reflects “the progress and the uniqueness of each learner in the cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains.”
This is not just semantic tinkering. It is a different philosophy of success.
Instead of asking, “How many marks did you get?” the system begins to ask:
What can you actually do with what you know?
How do you handle challenges, feedback, and collaboration?
How are you growing emotionally, socially, and ethically, not just cognitively?
How is your trajectory evolving over time, not just in one exam snapshot?
Holistic Progress Cards, as developed by PARAKH under NCERT for all four stages of schooling, are the concrete instruments designed to make that philosophy visible.
What exactly is a Holistic Progress Card?
PARAKH describes the Holistic Progress Card as an integrative, comprehensive document of a learner’s progress “captured across several curricular elements based on their performance on competency-based and multidisciplinary activities.” It is being developed for all stages of school education under the NEP 2020 5+3+3+4 structure.
Foundational Stage (Bal Vatika to Grade 2, ages 3–8)
Preparatory Stage (Grades 3–5, ages 8–11)
Middle Stage (Grades 6–8, ages 11–14)
Secondary Stage (Grades 9–12, ages 15–18).
At its core, the HPC does three things differently from a traditional report card.
1. It is 360-degree and multi-source
The HPC intentionally brings together perspectives from:
Teachers – through structured rubrics, observations, and narrative summaries.
Students – through self-assessment and reflections on their own learning.
Peers – through peer feedback on collaboration, empathy, and contribution.
Parents/caregivers – through home observations of behaviour, habits, and wellbeing.
In practice, this looks like:
Checklists where students rate how proud they felt of a project, or whether they could manage their emotions in difficult situations.
Peer forms where classmates note how someone helped resolve conflicts or contributed ideas.
Parent sections describing whether the child feels safe at school, participates in activities, and how they talk about their day.
The result is not a single teacher’s verdict, but a shared mirror that many people help hold up to the learner.
2. It spans multiple domains, not just academics
NEP 2020 emphasises holistic development cognitive, emotional, social, ethical, and physical. The HPC operationalises this by tracking competencies across domains such as:
Academic and cognitive – subject understanding, problem-solving, literacy and numeracy.
Socio-emotional and ethical – managing emotions, empathy, cooperation, respect.
Physical and health – motor development, participation in sports, health habits.
Language and communication – expressing ideas, listening, multilingual skills.
Aesthetic and cultural – arts, music, drama, appreciation of heritage.
PARAKH’s HPC prototypes even define cross-cutting abilities like Awareness, Sensitivity, and Creativity, and use simple metaphors (such as “Stream–Mountain–Sky”) to indicate levels from beginner to advanced across these abilities. This is a more human way of saying: how clearly do you understand, how deeply do you care, and how imaginatively can you respond?
3. It is evidence-based and narrative, not just numeric
The HPC draws on:
Task-based assessments (projects, role plays, experiments).
Observation records and anecdotal notes.
Portfolios of student work (artifacts, photos, writings).
Event and frequency sampling (e.g., how often certain behaviours appear).
Student goal-setting and reflection logs.
CBSE’s implementation guide is very clear: at the foundational stage, explicit tests and exams are “inappropriate”; assessment should largely be qualitative observations and documented evidence, compiled into a descriptive HPC rather than grades or scores.
Instead of “Maths: 72%”, a teacher might write:
“Understands number concepts well when working with real objects; needs support to explain strategies verbally, but shows increasing confidence in group tasks.”
In the higher grades, the secondary-stage HPC templates include sophisticated sections on time management, life skills, future plans (“Future Self – 10 years from now”), and an “Accomplishments Inventory” that tracks preparation for exams, portfolios, and civic contributions.
Taken together, the HPC is less a marksheet and more a living portfolio of a student’s journey.
Where AI enters the story: from static cards to living, learning systems
So far, this description could, in theory, be implemented entirely on paper. Many schools and boards are already experimenting with 360-degree HPCs without much technology, as seen in states like Himachal Pradesh and West Bengal.
However, both NEP 2020 and subsequent assessment reform documents go a step further. They explicitly encourage the use of AI and IT-based tracking of student progress from primary to senior secondary levels, and mention AI-based software to help students identify strengths, plan careers, and receive personalised support.
Some key trends are converging here:
AI in large-scale assessment – States like Himachal Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh have already used AI-enabled OCR/OMR systems to process lakhs of answer sheets at around 98% accuracy, giving teachers fast, actionable insights to address learning gaps.
AI in classroom assessment and item design – Generative AI tools are beginning to help teachers draft question banks, create differentiated worksheets, and even pre-score open responses, leaving more time for human judgment and feedback.
Competency-based frameworks and common scales – As described in earlier Knowledge Garden work on Item Response Theory, India is gradually building the technical backbone to place student performance on common ability scales across tests and contexts, which makes longitudinal tracking and adaptive support possible.
HPC templates that are inherently data-rich – The PARAKH HPC layouts are structured in a way that lends itself to digital capture: checklists, rubrics, multi-rater feedback, time logs, portfolios, and project metadata.
When these streams converge, AI can become the quiet engine that turns HPCs into living, learning systems:
Capturing data: Digitising teacher observations, portfolio artifacts, self and peer assessments, attendance, and participation.
Connecting dots: Spotting patterns across domains (e.g., linking dips in motivation with social-emotional indicators).
Summarising complexity: Generating draft narrative reports that teachers can refine, instead of writing everything from scratch.
Triggering timely support: Alerting teachers and counselors when trends suggest rising stress, disengagement, or risk of dropout.
Supporting personalisation: Feeding into adaptive learning tools that adjust difficulty levels or suggest targeted practice, as discussed in earlier articles on AI as the great equaliser.
In other words, AI does not create the idea of holistic progress. NEP 2020 and HPC do that. AI simply gives the system eyes and ears sharp enough to see holistic progress in real time, at scale.
Inside a school that is already living this future
To understand what this can look like on the ground, consider a composite picture drawn from conversations with principals and teachers in early HPC-adopting schools, along with case examples from states piloting 360-degree progress cards.
The principal’s dashboard
A secondary school principal in a hill district logs into the school’s assessment portal. Instead of a list of marks, the home screen shows:
A heat map of competencies by grade where foundational literacy and numeracy are strong, where critical thinking or collaboration need attention.
Trends in attendance alongside indicators of wellbeing from HPC self-reflections.
Alerts generated by an AI layer that has been trained on HPC data over the last three years: “Grade 8: notable rise in students reporting exam-related anxiety; consider timetable and counselling adjustments.”
Behind this is a data model built from the state’s 360-degree progress card initiative, similar to Himachal Pradesh’s work on holistic cards that capture academic, sports, cultural, and social participation for every student from nursery to Class 12. The HPC has become a school improvement tool, not just a student file.
The teacher’s assistant
In a middle school classroom, a science teacher is planning the term-end reflections. Over the term, she has:
Logged anecdotal observations against HPC abilities (Awareness, Sensitivity, Creativity).
Collected photos and short videos of group projects.
Used simple digital forms for students’ self and peer assessments during activities.
Alone, this would be overwhelming to synthesise. Here is where AI becomes indispensable.
An AI assistant trained on the HPC structure processes:
The checklists and ratings from students, peers, parents, and the teacher.
Key phrases from anecdotal notes and student reflections.
Metadata from project work (e.g., roles taken, persistence shown, collaboration patterns).
It then suggests:
A draft narrative profile for each student in teacher-facing language (“Often takes initiative in group work, but needs support to listen to quieter peers”).
A family-friendly summary stripped of jargon and acronyms.
A growth chart for each key ability and domain over the year.
The teacher remains in control: editing, adding nuance, correcting misinterpretations. But the blank page is gone. The administrative burden drops. More energy is available for the part of assessment that only humans can do: judgment, empathy, conversation.
The student’s portfolio
A Class 9 student opens their own dashboard. They see:
A timeline of projects, reflections, and achievements tagged to competencies (critical thinking, resilience, communication, ethical reasoning).
Feedback snippets from peers and teachers, pulled respectfully and transparently from HPC interactions.
Visualisations of how their self-ratings on emotions, collaboration, or time management have changed across terms.
A “Future Self” section is part of the secondary-stage HPC template where they have set goals for the next year and beyond, with reminders nudging them to revisit and refine these plans.
An AI-based guidance module, aligned with NEP’s vision of AI-assisted career planning, suggests:
“You consistently show strong collaboration and creative problem-solving in community projects. Here are some future pathways and subjects where these strengths matter.”
“Students with similar interest and strength patterns have found satisfaction in these combinations of higher education, vocational, or entrepreneurial routes.”
The student is not locked into these suggestions, and the system must be carefully governed to avoid bias. But for many first-generation learners, this is the first time any institution has systematically reflected back their whole selves, not just their exam ranks.
Case glimpses: early moves towards holistic, tech-enabled progress cards
Several developments across India show that this is not a distant utopia but a direction already being taken.
1. PARAKH’s national HPC framework
PARAKH has developed HPC prototypes for all four stages: foundational, preparatory, middle, and secondary and reports active dissemination to states and districts as part of NEP implementation. Each stage has:
Stage-appropriate domains and competencies.
Structured templates for attendance, multi-stakeholder feedback, and portfolios.
Detailed rubrics for awareness, sensitivity, creativity, and other core abilities.
Built-in student goal-setting and reflection elements, especially at the secondary level.
Teacher participation numbers in hands-on HPC exercises hundreds of teachers at each stage suggest that capacity-building has begun in earnest.
2. State-level 360-degree progress cards
States are starting to operationalise this vision in their own contexts:
Himachal Pradesh: The state board has announced 360-degree holistic progress cards for all students from nursery to Class 12, capturing academic, sports, cultural, and social aspects. New teachers are expected to use these records to understand each child’s talents and tailor teaching accordingly.
West Bengal: Notifications from the Commissioner of School Education introduce Holistic Progress Report Cards for Classes I–VIII from the 2025 academic year, with explicit references to “360-degree holistic progress” and integration into the state’s school management system portal. Indicators span cognitive domains (LPCD – Learning Perspective of Cognitive Domain) and behavioural-cognitive outcomes (BCO), with both summative and formative evaluation structures.
In both cases, the state platforms are, in effect, early HPC engines. As they mature, AI layers can be added to:
Spot state-wide trends (e.g., districts with rising social-emotional difficulties).
Support targeted teacher training where particular competencies lag.
Provide evidence for policy decisions that go far beyond simple pass percentages.
3. NCERT and CBSE guidance on HPC implementation
CBSE has adapted the NCERT/PARAKH foundational HPC prototype into a detailed teacher implementation guide. This document:
Emphasises assessment for and as learning, not just of learning.
Encourages the use of observations, anecdotal records, checklists, event sampling, portfolios, and task-based assessments as natural extensions of learning experiences.
Clarifies the roles of principals (creating a supportive culture), teachers (continuous documentation and reflection), and parents (active partners through feedback and meetings).
In parallel, national commentaries and explainer pieces highlight how HPCs are intended to shift India from a marks-obsessed culture to one where “academic, social, emotional, physical and creative growth” are all recognised as integral to success.
These early moves show a system inching from examination sheets to growth maps.
Holistic Progress Cards and the future of work: why employers should care
At first glance, HPCs might look like a purely school-internal reform. In reality, they have long-term implications for employment and the labour market.
1. From marks to competencies
Employers in India increasingly complain that graduates of school or college lack transferable skills such as critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and self-management, despite decent marks. Traditional report cards offer no reliable signals on these fronts.
HPCs, especially when AI-enabled and longitudinal, can:
Track competencies such as problem-solving, creativity, empathy, persistence, and ethical behaviour in structured ways.
Provide evidence for how these competencies showed up in concrete tasks (projects, community work, leadership roles).
Make it possible, over time, for higher education institutions and employers to consider multi-dimensional profiles rather than single exam scores.
This aligns with global shifts towards competency-based hiring and admissions, and with NEP’s own emphasis on life skills and holistic development as foundational to citizenship and employability.
2. Reducing information asymmetry for first-generation learners
In the current system, students from more advantaged backgrounds can supplement marksheets with:
Polished portfolios.
Extra-curricular certificates.
Recommendations and networks.
Students from less privileged backgrounds often cannot. HPCs, if implemented equitably, can partially level this field by:
Ensuring that every child has a basic digital portfolio of their work and growth, not just those who can afford enrichment opportunities.
Capturing school-based contributions (like helping peers, taking initiative in projects, persisting through adversity) that might otherwise go unseen outside the classroom.
Providing structured evidence for scholarships, vocational placements, and apprenticeships that look beyond marks.
AI can help by making these portfolios searchable and analysable at scale while strict guardrails protect against misuse and bias.
3. Informing career guidance and self-awareness
Secondary-stage HPC templates already include sections on goals, time management, life skills, and future plans. NEP commentary notes that AI-based software can support students in understanding their strengths and areas of focus for informed career choices.
An AI-augmented HPC could, for example:
Show a student that their long-term patterns reveal strong interest and ability in visual communication and teamwork, even if their exam scores are middling in some subjects.
Suggest pathways that blend these strengths such as design, media, or community-oriented roles alongside more conventional academic suggestions.
Flag when career aspirations and current preparation are misaligned, prompting timely counselling.
This is especially important in India, where many young people make career decisions based on limited information and social pressure rather than nuanced self-knowledge.
Design principles: when AI-powered HPCs equalise, and when they harm
Technology amplifies whatever design it is given. The same AI that can help teachers see the “whole child” can also become a tool for surveillance or labelling if used uncritically.
Several principles, grounded both in research and in early practice, can help keep HPCs on the right side of history.
1. Human first, AI second
NEP 2020 and PARAKH are clear that assessment exists to support learning, not to sort and punish. AI must therefore:
Assist teachers in collecting, organising, and interpreting data not to replace their professional judgment.
Surface patterns and possibilities, not deliver verdicts.
Support dialogue between teacher, student, and family, not short-circuit it.
Examples of “human first” design include:
AI summarisation tools that always require teacher review before reports are finalised.
Dashboards that highlight questions (“This student’s engagement dipped here what might be going on?”) rather than labels (“Low performer”).
Interfaces that bring self and peer reflections to the fore, reminding adults that students are active narrators of their own stories, not passive data points.
2. Privacy, consent, and data minimisation
Holistic, longitudinal data is powerful and deeply sensitive. Emotional states, behavioural trends, disciplinary incidents, and informal comments, all recorded and centralised, can be misused.
Robust governance is non-negotiable:
Clear policies about what is captured, who can see it, and for how long.
Strong data security, anonymisation for research, and strict prohibitions on commercial exploitation.
Age-appropriate consent mechanisms and genuine opt-outs for families.
Regular audits of AI models for bias, especially by gender, caste, language, disability, and region.
Without this, HPC data could entrench stigma or gatekeeper opportunities instead of expanding them.
3. Transparent and explainable AI
If AI models are being used to flag at-risk students or suggest interventions, their workings must be:
Transparent to educators (“What indicators led to this flag?”).
Open to challenge (“The AI thinks this student is disengaged, but here’s why that interpretation is incomplete”).
Calibrated collaboratively (“Let’s adjust the thresholds and indicators for our context”).
This is particularly critical in India, where structural inequities mean that data often reflects social bias. AI must not be allowed to launder such bias as “objective insight.”
4. Joy and agency at the centre
Earlier articles in this series have returned again and again to the theme of joyful, design-rich learning that honours curiosity, choice, storytelling, and real-life relevance.
HPCs and AI can either support that or quietly undermine it.
Supportive design looks like:
Portfolios that celebrate creativity, play, and experimentation, not only polished outcomes.
Reflection prompts that invite pride and self-compassion, not only self-critique.
Progress visualisations that emphasise growth over time rather than static comparisons with peers.
In other words, the system should ask, “How are you growing?” more often than, “How do you rank?”
Cost–benefit: can schools realistically adopt AI-powered HPCs?
Many school leaders and policymakers rightly ask: “All of this sounds good, but can a typical Indian school afford it in time, money, and capacity?”
1. The real costs
Implementing HPCs, even without AI, requires:
Time and training for teachers to shift from marks to evidence-based narratives.
Adjustments in school timetables to include project work, reflection, and portfolio curation.
Simple digital infrastructure devices for teachers, basic connectivity, and a school or state platform for recording HPC data.
Adding AI introduces further costs:
Platform development or integration with existing education management systems.
Cloud infrastructure and data storage, if done at scale.
Model development, localisation (languages, contexts), and maintenance.
Ongoing audits and governance mechanisms.
At first glance, this can appear daunting, especially for government or low-fee schools.
2. The hidden savings and returns
However, several factors tilt the cost–benefit equation in favour of thoughtful adoption:
Reduced administrative load: AI can automate large chunks of data entry (e.g., via OCR), compute summaries, and generate draft narratives, freeing teachers for more direct interaction.
Better-targeted interventions: Early, precise identification of learning and wellbeing issues can reduce later costs remedial coaching, dropouts, mental health crises, and disciplinary incidents.
Higher-quality teaching time: When teachers see exactly which competencies are lagging, they can design activities that address them, improving the learning return per instructional hour.
System-level efficiency: At the level of districts and states, AI-analysed HPC data can guide resource allocation and extra support to where learning deficits or socio-emotional issues are most concentrated rather than relying on coarse indicators.
Studies of AI-driven assessment and adaptive learning in Indian contexts already show how technology, when well-designed, can deliver large learning gains at relatively low marginal cost per student once infrastructure is in place.
In that light, the question becomes: What is the cost of not doing this? A system that continues to lose talent to exam anxiety, narrow definitions of merit, and invisible barriers may be far more expensive for individuals and for the economy than the investments required to build AI-augmented HPCs.
How different stakeholders can move from idea to implementation
Because this article sits in a broader Knowledge Garden series on curriculum lag, AI as an equaliser, personalised pathways, and assessment backbones like Item Response Theory it is useful to translate the vision of AI-powered HPCs into concrete next steps for different actors.
For school administrators and principals
Elevate HPCs from compliance to core practice Treat Holistic Progress Cards as central to the school’s definition of success, not as extra paperwork. Align staff goals, PD plans, and PTMs around HPC use.
Invest in simple, robust workflows before advanced AI Start by ensuring that teachers can comfortably document observations, portfolios, and multi-rater feedback using low-friction digital tools. AI layers can then sit on top of reliable data.
Protect time for reflection Schedule termly “HPC conferences” where teachers, students, and parents look at the whole picture together. This is where data becomes meaningful.
For teachers and educational leaders
See yourself as a learning designer, not a data clerk Design tasks, projects, discussions, performances that naturally reveal the competencies HPCs care about. Let AI handle some of the collation; keep the interpretive work human.
Normalise self and peer assessment Use simple, age-appropriate checklists and reflection prompts frequently, not just at term-end. Over time, students begin to internalise the language of growth rather than judgement.
Engage critically with AI suggestions Treat AI-generated summaries as draft hypotheses about your students, not facts. Confirm, nuance, or challenge them based on your lived relationship with the class.
For policymakers and government officials
Provide clear, unified frameworks Continue to strengthen HPC prototypes and guidelines through PARAKH, ensuring that all boards and states have access to aligned, NEP-consistent templates.
Invest in teacher capacity as much as in platforms The most beautiful HPC portal will fail if teachers are unprepared. Budget for sustained mentoring, not just one-off training, and create communities of practice around HPC implementation.
Embed strong data governance in policy Develop standards and regulations for privacy, consent, and AI use in assessment, with enforceable consequences for misuse. Involve child rights experts and marginalised communities in this process.
For parents and education advocates
Ask better questions at PTMs Move beyond “What rank did my child get?” to “What are my child’s strengths across domains?” and “How can we support their holistic growth at home?”
Value multiple forms of success Celebrate evidence of empathy, perseverance, creativity, and civic engagement as much as marks. HPCs can only shift culture if families also shift expectations.
For academic researchers and EdTech practitioners
Study impact with disaggregated lenses Monitor how HPCs and AI affect different groups by gender, caste, language, rural–urban, disability to ensure that new tools are closing, not widening, equity gaps.
Co-create with schools, don’t parachute solutions Work with teachers, principals, and students to design AI features that genuinely reduce friction and enhance insight, rather than adding complexity.
Linking back to the series: HPCs as the visible face of a deeper shift
Earlier articles in this series have traced several arcs:
How India’s curricula often lag the skills needed for tomorrow’s jobs.
How AI-powered personalised learning can act as a great equaliser when designed for inclusion.
How assessment theories like Item Response Theory can provide a common backbone for adaptive systems and fair comparisons.
Holistic Progress Cards are where many of these threads become visible to students and families. They are the face of deeper changes in curriculum, pedagogy, and measurement.
Personalised learning pathways are meaningless if report cards still only reward speed and memory.
AI tutors lose legitimacy if the school’s official documents ignore the competencies they cultivate.
Complex psychometric models remain abstract unless their outputs are translated into human-readable stories of growth that children can recognise themselves in.
HPCs, especially when thoughtfully powered by AI, can be that translation layer.
They tell a child:
“You are not your percentage. You are a learner in motion with strengths, struggles, and possibilities that deserve to be seen, understood, and supported from all sides.”
They tell a teacher:
“Your observations, your judgment, and your care matter as much as the test scores. Here is a structure that honours that.”
They tell a parent:
“Your child’s success is bigger than any one exam. Let’s look at who they are becoming.”
And they tell the system:
“If the goal is holistic, equitable, joyful education, then the way success is recorded and read must change accordingly.”
A final image: the progress card as mirror, window, and map
Imagine a student holding their Holistic Progress Card at the end of Class 10 not as a sheet of fear, but as a mirror, a window, and a map.
A mirror, reflecting back the many selves they have been in school: the child who struggled with reading and then found their rhythm; the teammate who learned to listen; the artist who painted quietly in the corner until a teacher noticed and included that work in the portfolio.
A window, letting others teachers, parents, future colleges or employers see a fuller picture of what they can do and how they have grown, far beyond marks.
A map, hinting at routes ahead: areas of strength to build on, skills to develop, directions that might fit their emerging sense of purpose.
AI does not replace human meaning-making. It helps weave together the countless strands of evidence into something legible and timely, especially in a system as large and complex as India’s.
If curriculum reform asks, “What should children learn?” and AI-enabled personalisation asks, “How can each child learn in their own way?”, then AI-powered Holistic Progress Cards ask a question that may be even more transformative:
“How can we honour everything that counts as learning and make that recognition itself a source of joy, equity, and opportunity?”
For Indian education, that question is not a technical detail. It is a quiet revolution.