India's exam system is broken, students are paying the price

By Khan Tahir 

India's entrance examinations have never been merely tests. For millions of families, they represent everything — a mother's prayers, a father's overtime wages, a sister's deferred dreams, a child's sleepless years. When the National Testing Agency was founded in 2017, it came with solemn promises: transparency, security, the end of cheating mafias, and a fair shot for every deserving student. Nearly a decade later, those promises lie in ruin.

The pattern has become numbingly familiar. A paper leaks. Outrage erupts. A senior official is removed. A committee is formed. Statements are issued assuring the public that the guilty will be punished. And then, months or years later, the same crisis returns wearing a slightly different face. NEET 2024 paralysed the country. UGC-NET followed. Now NEET 2026 is being spoken about in the same breath. Each time, the explanation offered is that a bad actor was found and removed. Each time, the system itself escapes scrutiny.

This is the central deception. The problem was never one rogue officer. It is structural. Question papers are printed in advance, moved across hundreds of locations, stored in rooms guarded by fallible human beings, and handled by dozens of people before a single student ever sees them. Every link in that chain is a potential breach. Yet after every scandal, the response has been to tighten the rules around students — stricter dress codes, transparent water bottles, hair clip inspections, multiple rounds of body searches — as though the children sitting the exam were the threat. The pockets of students are emptied while the holes inside the institution go unexamined.

The financial cost of these repeated failures is staggering and almost entirely borne by those least equipped to absorb it. A family that spent two years and two lakh rupees on coaching, hostel rooms, books, and travel does not get a refund when an exam is cancelled. A father who borrowed money does not have his debt written off. A mother who sold her jewellery is not compensated. The student simply has to begin again — fresh fees, fresh rent, fresh anxiety — while the institution issues another press release. Hundreds of crores of public money spent on conducting these examinations evaporate without consequence for anyone in authority. No minister resigns. No institution faces a financial penalty. The loss is always socialised; the accountability never arrives.

What makes this especially bitter is the psychological toll it extracts. Students preparing for NEET often spend four or more years in a state of sustained pressure, sacrificing adolescence for a single examination. When that examination is corrupted, it is not merely an inconvenience — it is a psychological collapse. Anxiety disorders, panic attacks, chronic sleeplessness, and a creeping sense that hard work itself has been made meaningless are now routine features of the medical entrance ecosystem. The cruelest irony is that a system designed to produce doctors is producing patients. Students who score near-perfect marks can no longer feel secure, because a question paper circulating on Telegram the night before can undo years of honest effort in a matter of hours.

The coaching industry, which feeds on this pressure and profits enormously from it, has largely escaped accountability too. The mafias that facilitate paper leaks operate with striking impunity. Investigations are announced with fanfare and concluded quietly. The powerful remain untouched. The student absorbs the consequences.

There are genuine reforms available if the political will existed to pursue them. A full independent audit of examination processes, a serious legal framework targeting paper leak networks, compensation mechanisms for students harmed by cancellations, a genuine shift toward computer-based testing with the infrastructure investment that would require, conducting major exams twice a year to reduce the catastrophic stakes of a single sitting — none of these are radical ideas. They are simply overdue. The tragedy is that they are raised after every crisis and shelved before the next one.

What India's examination system currently teaches its young people is not how to learn but how to endure. It asks them to trust a process that has repeatedly betrayed that trust, to invest everything in a system that treats their investment as disposable, and to accept, with quiet patience, a burden that belongs to the institution and not to them. The children who dream of becoming doctors deserve better than a system that makes them feel, before they have treated a single patient, that they are already the ones who are sick.