The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), taken by over 22 lakh candidates, was cancelled and rescheduled this summer after a paper leak was detected. The incident was attributed to the exam's heavy dependence on digital technology. Around the same time, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) introduced on-screen evaluation for its Grade 12 exams, which required scanning millions of answer sheets. The rush to declare results compounded scanning-related problems, leading to widespread dissatisfaction among schools and students.
According to education expert Krishna Kumar, both the NEET and CBSE fiascos are examples of a hasty embrace of digital technology. He argues they are also symptoms of a deeper issue. The NEET was conceived about two decades ago to address the multiplicity of state-level entrance tests, but it has proven difficult to manage. The agency responsible for conducting it, the National Testing Agency (NTA), lacks the academic and managerial capacity for a national-level exam. The NTA operates with a skeletal structure and mostly floating staff, which means it has no institutional memory of its repeated lapses.
Technology was expected to compensate for these shortcomings. Over the years, significant funds have been spent to make classrooms 'smart' and to use computers for mass testing to improve efficiency and prevent paper leaks. However, the opposite occurred. Paper leaks and questionable evaluation practices increased, and the main beneficiaries were ed-tech companies, which see schools and colleges as captive markets.
The forced adoption of smart classrooms and other digital practices has marginalised teachers and alienated them from students. As a result, the higher education system now faces a predicament. It cannot easily halt the consequences of erroneous reforms made in recent years, nor can it recover the strengths it had built over decades. These strengths have been sacrificed in the rush to imitate foreign systems, particularly the American one, in the name of globalisation and modernisation.
Most of these changes were opposed by teachers, but their resistance was ignored. The crisis in testing is only a symptom of a larger malaise—the steep decline of India's higher education sector. This decline can be attributed to several causes, including the loss of autonomy of universities.
