~ This post has been authored by Adyasha Syam.
Introduction
On 5 May 2024, more than 24 lakh aspiring medical professionals lined up in examination centres across the country for the NEET-UG (2024). The ordeal that followed was a web of inconsistencies, of paper leaks and arbitrary marking. While the NEET scandal drew widespread attention due to the scale of its discrepancies, such a situation is dishearteningly common in India, home to some of the toughest entrance examinations in the world. The competitive examination system of the country is fraught with regulatory gaps, with instances of unfair means cropping up yearly. These irregularities have severely detrimental effects on the futures of countless talented and deserving individuals.
The Administrative Challenges
The Schedule of the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024, defines public examinations as any examination conducted by constitutional bodies, government agencies or any other authority notified by the Central Government. This definition includes entities such as the UPSC and the NTA, both of which conduct highly selective examinations for recruitment in civil services and admission in reputed universities, involving lakhs of candidates every year. Such numbers, while intensifying the competition, bring with them a slew of administrative challenges that compromise the integrity of the examination system.
Most prominent among them is the problem of paper leaks, one that conducting agencies have yet to combat successfully. Various media reports highlight the occurrence of around 70 paper leaks in the last seven years alone, impacting over 1.7 crore applicants. The process of making question papers involves numerous stakeholders, from drafting to printing to transportation, effectively acting as a sieve from which the questions can slip through at any point. Once the breach has occurred, the rapid sharing of these leaked papers through social media is near impossible to counter, usually leaving the concerned authority with only two choices: to move ahead despite the leak or to delay/cancel the examination. The first option, seen most recently in the 2024 NEET fiasco, places sincere students at an inherent disadvantage than those having resorted to unfair means, while the latter creates mass confusion and uncertainty, disrupting schedules and ambitions akin.
Closely linked to the vice of paper leaks are the attempts of unscrupulous candidates to buy their ranks and scores. In Bihar, for instance, a police confession revealed that the NEET-UG question paper was leaked to others for prices around ₹30-₹32 lakh. Such incidents are not limited to the state of Bihar or the NEET-UG, representing a worrying trend of corruption that pushes quality educational and professional opportunities away from less privileged but deserving candidates.
Though the Public Examinations Act has laid down stringent punishments for paper leaks, as well as for cheating, tampering with answer sheets, violating examination norms and other offences, it operates on a purely ex-post basis. While severe penalties can serve as a deterrent to a handful of potential wrongdoers, they do nothing to prevent the thousands of others who choose to use these unfair means regardless and destroy the legitimacy of the examination in the process.
The Socioeconomic Factors
These discrepancies further exacerbate the plight of aspirants in an arena of unequal competition. For public examinations, merit is only one out of a multitude of factors that determine actual performance. The lack of uniformity in India’s education system, coupled with differences in social identity and socioeconomic status, presents formidable obstacles in the average aspirant’s journey. On a macro level, schooling in India is overseen by multiple boards of education: the CBSE, the CISCE, state boards and some international players. Each board prescribes a distinct curriculum for its students.
However, most entrance examinations to higher education institutes are skewed in favour of CBSE students. The JEE-Main, the NEET-UG and the CUET, all tickets to India’s leading universities, are based on syllabi prescribed by the NCERT, followed mostly in CBSE schools. Students from other education boards thus find themselves in an unfavourable position and, to make up this difference, often sign up for separate coaching programmes which may not be available in their immediate vicinity. While those in metropolitan areas are spoilt for choice, candidates from smaller towns and villages have to commute for long hours, if not relocate entirely, to access these courses.
Even for candidates who have studied the requisite syllabi, signing up for coaching classes has become an integral part of the preparation process. India’s coaching industry yields an annual revenue of approximately 58,000 crore. The accumulated costs of these intensive training programmes, study material, mock test series and the related logistical arrangements place a critical portion of the ideal preparation journey out of the reach of those belonging to lower classes and disadvantaged groups.
Another significant divisor of candidates is their language of choice. According the 2011 Census, only 10.6% of the Indian population can speak English. Major entrances like the JEE-Main and the NEET-UG are offered in just twelve out of India’s 22 Scheduled Languages, and law entrances like the CLAT and the AILET are exclusively in English. With English education linked to the urban elite and a dearth of quality material in regional languages, these restrictions worsen the existing stark class and linguistic divides. Added to the mix is the incendiary politics of reservations, resulting in the distortion of any semblance of an educational meritocracy.
Examinations and Society
With so many extraneous determinants, it is no surprise that public examinations affect not only hopeful candidates, but everyone around them. For the aspirant, years of rigorous preparation burden them with anxiety, guilt, and low self-esteem even as they neglect their wellbeing to study. For their family, the results are a culmination of all the invested time, money and every other compromise made for the aspirant. For the society in general, examinations are a yardstick to measure one’s worth. An individual’s performance therefore becomes a matter of their own and their family’s pride. In this scenario, a sole mistake can take the months of pent-up emotions to the tipping point. The number of suicides due to failure in examinations reached the alarming number of 2,248 in 2022. Volatile as candidates already are, even one small inconsistency in the examination process can upend their entire life and their loved ones’.
The Path Forward
Several rigid state-specific laws could not fix India’s public examination system, and the 2024 Act too falls short of any concrete preventive measures. Instead of prescribing punishments, the construction of a central framework is the need of the hour. Technology plays a critical role in this venture — a uniform automated software for all competitive examinations, encrypted question banks and randomized question sets for each candidate can reduce the likelihood of manipulation and make proctoring much more effective.
However, this systemic transformation requires immense resources and carefully trained manpower to execute, stretching the timeline of implementation. In the meanwhile, it is essential for existing authorities to adopt a transparent and accountable approach, with regular audits and compliance checks for all officials. Most crucial of all are sensitization programmes to foster societal recognition of the pressures and unpredictability of examinations. By building an atmosphere of support around the candidate, such measures can help shield them from all the heartbreak that the formal examination system failed to avoid.