Reforming the System, Not Rejecting It
I’m from Bharat (India), and from the moment we enter formal education until we potentially leave academia in our mid-twenties, our lives become an endless procession of examinations. It is a relentless cycle where cutoffs — those seemingly arbitrary numbers that determine our opportunities and future become the primary measure of our worth, while years of genuine learning, curiosity, innovation, and personal growth often go unnoticed. A system that claims to evaluate students has, in many ways, become one designed to eliminate them. We have built an education culture where a student who spends weekends building projects, conducting independent research, or creating something meaningful sees those achievements dismissed as merely “extracurricular,” while another who masters the art of scoring well in standardized tests is celebrated as the ideal student.
The consequences of this examination-obsessed culture became starkly visible, when the NEET-UG controversy exposed serious weaknesses in the country’s examination system. Allegations of paper leaks, irregularities, and the circulation of questions before the exam raised widespread concerns about the integrity of a test that determines the future of millions of students. It was not merely an isolated incident but part of a recurring pattern in which examination failures repeatedly shake public confidence. Yet the institutional response often follows a familiar script: transfers, temporary suspensions, inquiry committees, and assurances of reform — while the deeper structural vulnerabilities in examination security, accountability, and oversight continue to demand lasting solutions.
Among India’s many examination bodies, the NTA deserves special attention because it conducts some of the country’s most important entrance exams, including JEE Main, NEET-UG, CUET, and UGC-NET. It was created in 2018 under the Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Education, with the sole purpose of conducting entrance examinations after CBSE and individual universities handled them separately. Despite this crucial responsibility, NTA is an autonomous society registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860, rather than a statutory body. It functions with a small permanent workforce and outsources a large part of its operations like IT infrastructure, examination centres, logistics, and other support services to private vendors through government procurement. While outsourcing is common in public administration, such heavy dependence on multiple contractors for core examination functions raises concerns about coordination, accountability, and oversight. When an organisation responsible for examinations involving millions of students relies extensively on external agencies, even small failures can have nationwide consequences. Given its critical role, NTA needs stronger in-house capacity, tighter oversight, and structural reforms to improve the security, reliability, and integrity of India’s examination system.
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It is easy to criticize institutions after they fail, but criticism without solutions achieves little. The examination crisis is not irreversible. India already has the technological capability and institutional expertise to build a far more secure, transparent, and resilient examination system. Instead of merely reacting to every controversy with committees and transfers, we should redesign the system itself. Many of these reforms have already been suggested by leading educationists and draw from successful examination models used across the world. Here are some:
- Strengthen NTA institutionally: Give NTA a statutory or constitutionally protected status, similar to UPSC, with greater independence, stable leadership, and clearly defined accountability instead of operating as a society under the Societies Registration Act.
- Greater academic ownership: Involve IITs, IISc, AIIMS, central universities, and other leading institutions in question paper design, moderation, security audits, and examination governance instead of relying predominantly on administrative processes.
- Move to Computer-Based Testing (CBT): Conduct large-scale examinations digitally wherever feasible. CBT significantly reduces dependence on printing, transporting, storing, and physically securing question papers, the stages where most paper leaks occur. Question sets can be encrypted, delivered just before the examination, and randomly generated from a large question bank, making mass leaks substantially more difficult. It also enables faster evaluation and improves auditability.
- Multiple examination windows: Instead of a single high stakes exam every year, conduct multiple sessions, similar to the JEE Main. This reduces pressure on students and ensures that one operational failure does not affect an entire year’s admissions.
- Large encrypted question bank: Maintain a massive repository of validated questions with algorithmic randomization so that every candidate receives a different but equivalent paper, greatly reducing the value of leaked questions.
- Reduce dependence on vendors: Build stronger in-house expertise in cybersecurity, examination logistics, digital infrastructure, and risk management, while using vendors only for support services under strict oversight.
Disclaimer: While this essay is critical of India’s examination culture and the functioning of the NTA, it does not argue that competitive examinations should be abolished. Given the scale of India and the sheer number of applicants competing for limited seats, standardized entrance examinations remain the fairest and most practical method currently available. At present, there is no universally proven alternative that can evaluate millions of candidates with the same level of scalability and objectivity. The real issue is not the existence of examinations, but the excessive dependence on a handful of high-stakes tests caused by the severe shortage of quality higher education seats. As India’s Gross Enrollment Ratio continues to rise, the country must significantly expand the capacity of universities and premier institutions so that admission becomes less of a zero-sum competition. Increasing the number of quality seats, alongside reforming the examination system, will reduce the pressure on students and make the process fairer without compromising merit.
I have used AI heavily esp NotebookLM. Pardon if you find this AI generated but I have tried to put my ideas in which I believe.
