India's Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has announced that Class 12 students in the UAE and six other West Asian countries whose 2026 board exams were disrupted by regional conflict will be able to sit fresh examinations. Registration for the retests runs from September 22 to 26, and the board has stressed there will be no extension to that window.
The countries covered by the decision, besides the UAE, are Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Only students whose results were declared under the special assessment scheme CBSE applied to these countries this year are eligible to register. the retests will cover 40 subjects in total, split evenly between 20 academic and 20 skill-based subjects. The exact exam dates will be communicated after registration closes, with a detailed schedule to follow. Exam centres in the UAE will remain unchanged from the original sitting.
The board has confirmed that no examination fee will be charged, and that marks from the fresh exams will replace students' earlier performance, with the new result treated as final. The move follows concerns raised by families of Indian students in the UAE over this year's disrupted assessment process, and is expected to resolve some of the uncertainty that has hung over affected students' academic records since the exams were first cancelled.