To a naïve viewer of India’s education sector, it could seem that the country’s apex examination agency cannot catch a break. Months after botching the country’s premier medical entrance examination – not only jeopardising the futures of 2.3 million students but also precipitating the largest street protests in years that extracted the resignation of the Union education minister — the National Testing Agency (NTA) has been forced to cancel three subject papers in the UGC-NET examination because the question papers
To a naïve viewer of India’s education sector, it could seem that the country’s apex examination agency cannot catch a break. Months after botching the country’s premier medical entrance examination – not only jeopardising the futures of 2.3 million students but also precipitating the largest street protests in years that extracted the resignation of the Union education minister — the National Testing Agency (NTA) has been forced to cancel three subject papers in the UGC-NET examination because the question papers contained glaring errors, typos, repeated whole chunks from previous years’ tests. That this is the second time in three years NTA has been forced to scrap the UGC-NET speaks to the incompetence of the agency in charge of India’s examination architecture and the cavalier attitudes of the bureaucrats who run it. The ridiculous re-run of 2024 — when the NEET and UGC-NET exams were affected — shows that little has changed within the agency despite a high-powered committee set up and plenty of assurances inside Parliament and outside.
Clearly, few lessons were learnt from the massive political fallout of the NEET fiasco. This is why it is galling that the education ministry has directed NTA to audit its examination processes and submit a report on “corrective action” in 30 days. How can ad-hocism be audited? What is the corrective action for copy-pasting questions from previous years? What is the recourse for not fact-checking (or even spell-checking) question papers? If NTA could be trusted to course-correct, it would have done so after the 2024 imbroglio and put in place systems that didn’t depend on dubious subject experts who’d then leak papers for financial gain. The time for a self-review is gone, as is the time for incremental tweaks that remove some officers and appoint new ones. The future of millions of students is at stake. The government must revamp NTA and put in place external auditors and independent monitoring.
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