The reputations of the National Testing Agency (NTA) and the Union Ministry of Education are in tatters after it was reported on Friday (May 30) that the conduct of the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) for undergraduate programmes was disrupted due to a technical glitch. Thousands of students were unable to access the question paper or were delayed in doing so. As a result, those who could not log in at all will be allowed to attend the exam again.
For NTA, the embarrassment could not have come sooner. The agency is facing a CBI probe into the leak of the question paper ahead of the NEET-UG 2026 exam on May 3. The test will be held again on June 21. While the investigation will hopefully bust the racket behind the paper leak, these cases add to the NTA’s woeful record. Two years ago, the NEET-UG was compromised when questions leaked in Bihar, enabling 67 candidates to score the maximum 720/720 marks.
In parallel to the NTA’s botch up, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) is facing allegations of incompetence over its flawed transition to an on-screen marking (OSM) system. After thousands of Class 12 students reported anomalies in the marks awarded to them, the OSM system has been found to be bedevilled by poor quality of scanned answer scripts, missed answers, and wrong marking. Raising doubts about the security of the OSM system, ethical hackers have claimed they could bypass authentication controls and access evaluator data.
Obviously, taken together, these failures point to the fact that evaluation mechanisms in our educational system are in shambles. Paper leaks are a persisting affliction in India. They beset most board exams, competitive admission tests, and recruitment procedures for jobs in government, railways, banks, and police. Given this unwanted ubiquity, it is useful to examine what solutions are being proposed by way of riddance.
Unfortunately, the solutions proposed tend to be technical fixes but not institutional. NTA has submitted in court that it will transition from paper-based exams to computer-based testing (CBT) for NEET. To people familiar with digital skills, this may sound good, and potentially foolproof, but it may only impose yet another handicap upon students from underprivileged backgrounds. Plus, there is the question of infrastructure efficiency and availability, the shortcomings of which have been amply shown up by the CBSE and CUET snafus this week. The CUET test was in fact operated by TCS, the country’s premier IT company.
Other solutions proposed in recent days are downright fanciful, such as the proposal that emerged from a meeting of union ministers last week to use the IAF to transport NEET question papers. To use the nation’s air force for a task that is the core mandate of agencies like NTA and CBSE only shows up their utter incompetence and a total bankruptcy of ideas.
Amid the confusion confounded by three concurrent exam botch ups, it was the Supreme Court that threw up a useful insight. Hearing a petition on the NEET case, the apex correctly diagnosed the problem as an institutional failing. Indeed, the first response of both NTA and CBSE in these three cases was to avoid admitting institutional responsibility. Until these agencies submit to accountability, no amount of technical tinkering will mend this broken system.