Has the National Testing Agency been let off lightly?

Even as students and examinees are reconciled to the Supreme Court ruling against cancelling the NEET-UG test 2024 for filling undergraduate seats in medical colleges, the judgment has disappointed many.

The National Testing Agency (NTA) was set up in 2017, and has been entrusted with conducting as many as 17 significant admission tests in the country. They include admission to Central universities including Jawaharlal Nehru University and Delhi University, admission to medical colleges, UGC-National Eligibility Test and the CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education), besides admission to a host of professional courses.

Very little, however, is known about the NTA itself. Its website provides no access to its annual reports or panel of experts, advisors, regional officers or even helpline numbers. In a letter to the Union education minister, Trinamool Congress Rajya Sabha MP Sagarika Ghose has pointed out that the NTA website provides just two landline numbers and the names of only three people, namely the chairperson, the director-general, and one other member.  

Though the NTA is an NGO, there is no information about the amount of grants it has received from the government and universities. There is no transparency in how it collects fees from examinees, or about its expenditure. “The only job of NTA appears to be to outsource. Its chairman has a very dubious record as chairman of the Madhya Pradesh Public Service Commission,” posted another Rajya Sabha MP, Jairam Ramesh of the Congress.

Its conduct of the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) to fill seats in medical colleges this year was scandalous enough to raise a number of questions about the agency. In a scathing judgment on Friday, the Supreme Court called for a serious review of the conduct of the NTA, for mishandling medical entrance examinations and failing to prevent leaks.

While the Supreme Court refused to order a retest, it directed a complete overhaul and audit of the examination process. Among the several observations made by the three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud were the following:

• NTA has sufficient resources, adequate funding, time, and opportunities to organise exams such as the NEET without lapses of the kind that occurred this year

• The NTA initially awarded grace marks to 1,563 students after realising that they were allotted the wrong question paper, and then later decided to withdraw their scores and conduct a re-test

• A body such as NTA cannot afford to take an incorrect decision, and amend it at a later stage... Flip-flops are anathema to fairness

• The NTA provided varying versions about when and where question papers were leaked, including that they were taken away by people who had breached the “rear door” of an exam centre

• The NTA also decided to grant marks for two options to a physics question in the NEET paper, reasoning that both answers were right. An Indian Institute of Technology (Delhi) team, on request from the Supreme Court, reported that only one of the two answers were correct

The three-judge bench directed the high-powered committee set up by the government and headed by former Indian Space Research Organisation chairperson K. Radhakrishnan to recommend and implement a complete overhaul of the exam process, including rectifying “serious security lapses”, introduce data protection measures, periodic audits, surprise inspections of exam centres, grievance redressal mechanisms for students and foolproof logistics, pointing out that question papers were transported in e-rickshaws during NEET-UG 2024. It also directed more comprehensive CCTV surveillance.