AA Edit | As NTA Stumbles Again, Time For A Total Overhaul

The announcement by the National Testing Agency (NTA) cancelling the English, commerce and sociology papers of the UGC-NET examination held in June this year is yet another example of the callous way the national agency went about its job and took the young people of this country for a ride. The Union government must at least now look seriously into its functioning and make transformational changes instead of opting for quick fixes and ad hoc measures.

Post-graduate students across the country take the UGC-NET examination with the hope that it could open to them the world of academia. An enormous amount of effort goes into preparing for it as the national test is intended to select some of the best candidates who will direct research and teaching in this country. Unfortunately, the NTA, the government agency which conducts this test, does not approach the examination with the same seriousness as the students. It may be remembered that the NTA had released the answer key of this year’s UGC-NET examination one-and-a-half months after the examination against the usual timeframe of a couple of weeks.

The decision to cancel the examination has come after a committee appointed by the NTA to examine several complaints about multiple errors in these papers submitted a report that should make everyone associated with the agency hang their heads in shame. The papers had “many factual, typographical, and translation errors including misspelt names of prominent scholars, garbled book titles, errors in the stem wording of questions, grammatical errors, gender and number agreement errors, punctuation mistakes, and non-standard coined terms for established concepts, as well as repetition of a significant number of questions previously administered.” The agency conceded that “papers carrying such defects do not meet the standards of fairness and error-free examination, and defects of this extent cannot be cured merely by dropping questions after the challenge process,” and hence ordered a re-test.

The NTA’s inability to conduct a series of important examinations efficiently has been discussed exhaustively in this country for several years. The 2024 question paper leak in the Neet had prompted the government to take two steps: one, to appoint a committee of experts to strengthen the agency and two, to tighten the law and increase the punishment for the wrongdoers convicted of messing up with examinations. The government took a similar step after this year’s massive bungling in several examinations without bothering to take the corrective steps suggested by the K. Radhakrishnan committee which made a slew of recommendations to avoid the mistakes.

It may be recalled that the CBI which investigated the leak in the Neet question papers found that the rot in the agency had set in so deeply that that people who have access to the question papers, including those who set them, were involved in the leak. It has emerged as a porous, shaky and untrustworthy organisation entrusted with the job of selecting the brightest students for the country’s most important and critical educational institutions. The government owes the young people of this country proper corrective action to ensure that this year’s lapses are never repeated.