Students protesting against NTA and Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan at Jantar Mantar, in New Delhi, on June 29, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Sushil Kumar Verma
The story so far: The National Testing Agency (NTA) has come under intense fire over the past few weeks, with widespread allegations of cheating, paper leaks and other irregularities impacting flagship examinations such as the NEET (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test) for undergraduate medical college admissions and the UGC-NET for Ph.D and assistant professor appointments. The agency’s director general, Subodh Kumar Singh, has been removed, the CBI is probing irregularities, and a high-level panel has been set up to create a roadmap for a systemic overhaul.
EDITORIAL | Testing times: On the need to mend the National Testing Agency
What is the NTA?
The NTA was set up in 2017 as a specialist, self-sustaining and autonomous organisation under the aegis of the Union Education Ministry. Its director general and governing body are appointed by the Union government. However, it is registered as a society and is a separate legal entity, which raises questions about the government’s legal liability for the NTA’s actions. Its main mandate is to conduct efficient, transparent and international standard tests to assess the competency of candidates for admission, and recruitment purposes. Soon after it was established, the NTA took over the conduct of major all-India examinations, such as the JEE for engineering college admissions, NEET-UG, and UGC-NET (both of which had previously been conducted by the Central Board for Secondary Education or CBSE), as well as the entrance tests for Jawaharlal Nehru University and Delhi University. The National Education Policy of 2020 envisaged a broader role, recommending that the NTA conduct an entrance or aptitude test for all universities across the country. In all, the NTA now has charge for more than 20 examinations.
Why have there been so many problems?
One of the main problems is that the NTA was originally intended to conduct computer-based tests only. “This will ensure that high volume can be processed in a short period of time,” says the agency’s website, claiming that such online testing will “eliminate the possibility of leakage of questions and question papers, post-test malpractice of filling in the OMR sheets, late entry of students to cheat in the test, subjectivity errors on descriptive testing, etc…In a short period of three years, all the tests administered by NTA will be computer adaptive. This will completely eliminate the problem of cheating,” it declares. Thus, when the NTA took over conduct of the UGC-NET examination from the CBSE six years ago, it was converted from a pen-and-paper examination to a computer-adaptive test. This year, however, for reasons that are unclear, UGC-NET shifted back to the pen-and-paper mode. The day after it was conducted for over 11 lakh aspirants, the government cancelled the examination, citing inputs from the cyber crime unit. “Pen-and-paper is a heaven for scamsters,” said one former official, noting that the printing process is particularly vulnerable to leaks. It is interesting that when the government announced fresh dates for UGC-NET 2024 to be held again, it also stipulated that it would be a computer-adaptive test this time.
However, when the conduct of NEET-UG was taken over by the NTA, the Health Ministry flatly refused to allow it to shift to a computer-based exam, citing concerns about students in rural areas who would not be prepared for an online exam, as well as Supreme Court rulings on how the examination should be conducted. Hence, the NTA has been forced to run a major examination in a mode that it was never intended to implement by design.
Officials and educationists note that the agency is severely understaffed for the role it is currently being asked to undertake. According to a senior official, the agency was set up with only about 25 permanent staff positions. A number of its functions have also been outsourced to technical partners from the very beginning. Given that NEET-UG alone had more than 23 lakh candidates writing the examination in almost 5,000 centres across the country and abroad, this has left the agency stretched thin, according to some officials. “The NTA was set up to be a lean, professional organisation. The more people, the higher risks. The NIC [National Informatics Centre] simply does not have the capacity or IT infrastructure needed, so it was always meant to engage third-party technical partners which have the robust cyber security expertise needed to run large-scale computer based examinations,” said R. Subrahmanyam, former Higher Education Secretary who was in charge at the time the NTA was set up. However, some educationists have complained that engaging third-party players takes accountability out of the government’s hands and leaves loopholes in the system which can be exploited by unscrupulous players.
Officials say the NTA has also failed to develop robust mechanisms needed to handle a large-scale pen-and-paper examination, including the setting of the question paper and its encryption, selection of external printing presses and exam centres, transportation to printing presses, storage and distribution to examinees at examination centres and then the collection and transportation of answer sheets to evaluation centres. Each of these is a stage where malpractice can occur without robust security mechanisms.
What is the way ahead?
The high-level panel headed by former ISRO chief K. Radhakrishnan has been given two months to recommend reforms in the examination process, improve data security protocols, and overhaul the NTA’s functioning.
Educationists, however, propose starkly different pathways for the future. One option is to add manpower and infrastructure to the NTA to equip it to take on large-scale pen-and-paper examinations in an improvement to the CBSE system that preceded it. Those recommending this return to the past point out that pen-and-paper examinations are more equitable, especially for students in rural and remote areas with little access to technology.
Another option is to dismantle the centralisation process that seeks to move all testing in the country under the NTA. Some State governments, and professors from individual universities, notably JNU, have called for entrance tests for their institutions to be removed from the NTA and handed back to the institutions themselves, arguing that more decentralised structures are needed to meet the vastly differing needs of institutions.
However, others seek a more radical reform of the assessment system. They suggest systemic changes to remove the single, high-stakes entrance examination which results in extreme pressure on students, encourages an inequitable coaching industry, and incentivises malpractice. Instead, periodic assessments of knowledge, concept-based understanding, and aptitude can be conducted in the final years of school education as the precursor to the admission process, using online testing, and AI-based proctoring which can be overseen by the NTA.
