Why National Testing Agency must fix who sets question papers and how

Repeated NTA failures expose the real crisis: weak question-setting, outsourced expertise, poor vetting and the absence of permanent professional capacityLet’s give the Union government its due. It has moved quicker this time than it did in 2024. Dharmendra Pradhan resigned as Union education minister on July 25 after weeks of students protesting at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar.Pralhad Joshi took charge, ordered a full audit of the National Testing Agency (NTA) and set a 30-day deadline for a corrective action report. More than 50 NTA employees are out. Ten leadership posts are up for hiring, among them a chief technology officer, a chief information security officer and specialists in test security, psychometrics and question-paper design.On July 26, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a taskforce under Infosys founder Nandan Nilekani to build an examination system nobody can breach. The taskforce includes former ISRO chairman S. Somanath, former Intelligence Bureau director Tapan Deka, IIT Madras director V. Kamakoti, former education secretary Anita Karwal and logistics expert Amrit Lal Meena.Then read what that taskforce has actually been asked to look at. AI surveillance. Cybersecurity. Secure logistics. Candidate authentication. A timetable for moving the big national entrance tests to computer-based testing. Every item on that list concerns what happens to a question paper after somebody has written it. Not one concerns the writing. Joshi’s other big order of a complete overhaul of the NTA’s Confidential Operations setup—sealed rooms, air-gapped machines, phones surrendered at the door—is about the room, not about the man sitting in it. In fact, the room was never the problem.On August 16, the NTA cancelled its UGC-NET papers in English, Commerce and Sociology, held between June 22 and 30, and ordered a retest on September 9-10 for more than 157,000 candidates. What its own committee found is worth reading. Misspelt names of scholars. Book titles nobody could identify. Questions phrased so badly that they broke basic grammar. Invented terms for concepts that already have standard ones. And repetition—a lot of it—from earlier papers. In English, 67 of the 150 questions are alleged to have come straight out of the December 2024 test, all from Paper II, with even the order of the options left as it was.Now remember what the UGC-NET is. It is a computer-based test. There are no trunks, no bank vaults, no GPS-tracked vans, no strongroom for a school principal to open from the back. The one reform every committee has pushed hardest for—get India’s big exams onto computers—was already in place here. It changed nothing, because nothing had gone wrong downstream. Encryption does not make a bad question good. An air gap does not make a recycled question new.The NEET-UG leak in May usually gets filed under a different heading. Crime, not incompetence. But read the CBI’s case and the two collapse into each other. The paper was not compromised at a printing press or a courier van or the gate of an exam hall. It happened at the stage where the questions were being written and translated.NEET-UG is set in 13 languages, and to keep exposure low the NTA sometimes hands the same expert both jobs: setting and translating. P.V. Kulkarni, a Chemistry lecturer, had 45 Chemistry questions. Manisha Gurunath Mandhare, a Biology expert, had 90. Both from Pune. Both had known each other for years. Between them they were holding all 135 Biology and Chemistry questions.That is not a criminal ring beating a secure system. That is the system handing two people the whole paper and hoping for the best. NTA director-general Abhishek Singh’s own account of it was that many of these translators had been around for six or seven years and the organisation had come to trust them. Trust is not an architecture. And the trust was not carelessness either. It is what you fall back on when you do not employ the people who write your exams.The NTA has no question-writing capability of its own. It borrows one, every cycle. Outside academics on subject panels build the bank, moderators pick the sets, vetters solve them independently, translators take them into the regional languages, back-translators check the translation. The whole thing runs on honoraria, from a small and familiar pool, in a Delhi room for about a week, phones deposited at the entrance.Pankaj Bansal, who co-founded HR tech firm PeopleStrong and sat on the K. Radhakrishnan Committee, put the gap in one comparison: the Educational Testing Service in the US, which runs the GRE and the TOEFL, employs some 600 researchers. The NTA has almost nobody, no psychometricians to speak of, no deep item-writing experts—and that is not something you assemble in 12 months. Frisking and CCTV decide what setters can carry out of the room. They have nothing to say about what they were never equipped to bring into it.None of this is a fresh diagnosis. The Radhakrishnan Committee, set up in June 2024 after the last NEET collapse, made it recommendation number nine—vetted expert pools, secure question-setting and formatting systems, controlled-access confidential operations, encrypted and tamper-proof delivery. Two years on, it had not been done.What the government did move on, and quickly, were the visible things. District-level coordination. Aadhaar authentication. AI-enabled CCTV. Government-owned centres. Those reforms hardened the logistics chain and left the paper-setting end exactly as it was. Which is where 2026 broke. Twice.Anyone who read the 2024 failures as failures of authorship rather than of security has been sitting on all of this for two years. That year’s NEET Physics question turned on which edition of an NCERT textbook a candidate happened to own; the NTA accepted one answer, then allowed two, pushing up the number of perfect scores until the Supreme Court sent it to experts, who said only one option was ever correct.And when the rescheduled UGC-NET results came out that September, candidates counted more than 60 wrong answers in the provisional key for the History paper alone. To contest them, at Rs 200 a question, would have cost Rs 12,000. When an agency charges students to fix its own errors, it has quietly decided those errors are not its problem.Fixing this does not need another panel. It needs the NTA to finally do the one job it has never done. Build a permanent, salaried question-development wing, and pay it enough to draw serious academics. Build a question bank big enough, and randomise late enough, so that no setter knows which exam her question will turn up in.That is what Abhishek Singh means when he says paper-setting should become exam-agnostic. Separate setting from translation so that nobody ever holds a full subject. Make vetting mean something. The NET papers suggest nobody actually re-solved them. And run an automated check against every past paper, which would have caught 67 repeats in seconds, and which the agency clearly does not run.There is the accountability question too, and the agency is still ducking it. The ministry of education says the committee’s findings on the three NET papers are internal and will not be published. The NTA took 47 days after the exams ended to put out provisional keys and announce the cancellations, a delay that happens to cover the entire monsoon session of Parliament, which sat from July 20 to August 13, and which the ministry explains as levels of checking and verification.The Nilekani taskforce will almost certainly produce a fine report on encryption, authentication and the shift to computer-based testing. India will end up with a much better pipe. Nobody in this reform cycle seems to have asked what is going to flow through it. If the NTA still cannot put together 150 original, correctly spelt, syllabus-compliant questions in English, a paper with no security dimension at all, what is all that technology being built to protect?Subscribe to India Today Magazine- EndsPublished By: Akshita JollyPublished On: Aug 18, 2026 18:38 IST