Vinay Kumar
While moves to make NTA leak-proof are welcome, India should revert to a less centralised exam system
One good outcome of the youth protest is that govt has become serious about exam leaks. It’s proposed longer jail terms and heftier fines for culprits, and also set up a committee with the mandate to make exams leak-proof. There have been other committees, but with Nandan Nilekani at its helm, this one seems credible. As Infosys co-founder and UIDAI founder-chairman, Nilekani can be expected to pull off what the PM wants: “maximum use of tech for making exams clean and transparent”. That will mean injecting safeguards into every stage of the exam cycle, from setting question papers to checking and declaration of results.
There’s no doubt that this can be done. China’s Gaokao is among the largest “gatekeeper” exams in the world. Korea’s Suneung isn’t comparable in scale, but is equally important. And both have good track records, made possible with tech. But tech can only fix security gaps in the functioning of National Testing Agency. Deeper questions about its founding and functioning, however, remain unanswered.
In the almost nine years that it has existed, NTA has not exactly covered itself in glory. There have been too many failures, such as the bungled result of NEET 2020 that led to Vidhi Suryavanshi’s suicide – NTA reported she had scored 6 marks, when her actual score was 590. The whole point of centralising entrance exams – against the Constitutional stress on federalism in education – was to offer a better, glitch-free experience, so that meritorious students might score seats anywhere in the country. But by creating one uniform pattern for each exam, NTA’s made the coaching industry more efficient and powerful. By following the NCERT syllabus at the undergraduate level, it’s also disadvantaged students from state boards, most of whom are from less privileged backgrounds.
This is not a call to dismantle NTA, but when reforms are afoot, all problems must be addressed. One way could be to create a hybrid system in which tests held by NTA – NEET, CUET, etc – are only used to fill a certain percentage of all-India seats in state-run institutes. The states can fill the rest with their own common entrance tests, as was the case before. This restores the federal framework of higher education. It also shields the testing process from leaks, because one leak cannot affect all seats. There would be many more ideas – govt should consider them all to create a better testing system.
https://telanganatoday.com/opinion-neet-the-crisis-of-educational-centralisation
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
