Acid test for the exam system

Underfunded exam-taking bodies are no match for the stakes of examinees

What are the stakes to game the examination system in India? To get an answer one has to ride the metro to Vikas Marg in East Delhi. As one steps out of the station the walls opposite in three directions are blanketed with billboards. Each advertises services to train students for myriad examinations. The numerous shacks, often just a room, scream they provide the best route to “crack” an exam. Jostling with them for space are the exam book sellers, also fiercely competitive. Various estimates put the numbers of these institutes in the national capital region at 800-plus.

Their numbers demonstrate the market that passing of an examination provide for entrepreneurs in India with the largest percentage of young population in the world. Each of those shops service the examinations held annually by the Union Public Service Commission, the Staff Selection Commission and the assorted banking boards. There are 30 such held every year for entry to all sorts of government posts from officers to clerical cadre, besides semi-government jobs including college and school level teaching posts. In addition are the school level examinations.

Through many of these shops, the entrepreneurs infiltrate the administration of the examinations. Unfortunately as the recent case of leakage of certain CBSE papers show, the authorities are hardly prepared to deal with this challenge. The budgets for the exam-taking bodies are puny, pitted against determination of the examinees and the entrepreneurs. There is scarce public data of how much it costs the various examination-taking bodies to conduct these public service examinations. As the stakes have risen, examination papers have got leaked or answer sheets got tampered.

For instance, the Staff Selection Commission, right now under public glare for allegations for leak of question papers, spent just Rs 97 per candidates for each of the eight competitive examinations it conducted in 2015-16, the latest year for which data is available. The comparable numbers for the Central Board of Secondary Education are even less. The National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) spends about Rs 1,867 per candidate. The figure for the Union Public Service Commission is no better, just Rs 2,267. These are however just a simple mean of the number of candidates pitted against the total annual budget of the organisation. The actual numbers would be even less when one allows for the cost of running the organisation. All these organisations, except the UPSC which gets a constitutionally mandated grant, suffer from a basic handicap. They have to depend on the students, rather the examinees, to foot the bill for the examinations. For instance, the NIOS generates almost 95 per cent of its annual budget from the fees the students pay. Same for the SSC. While fair in principle, it limits the price these bodies can pay to ramp up their security architecture to deliver the exams in a fair manner. A tender notice put out by NIOS notes it will pay just Rs 5 million to a data processing agency to process the examination results and collation of the results of the 2018 exams.

It is not that outsourcing the task to private agencies would necessarily improve the outcomes. Yet given the puny budgets of the various testing organisations in India, the alternative — of keeping to the present arrangement — is a fraught exercise. The unsavoury picture of relatives of students climbing the walls of schools in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to pass on chits for the class XII exams demonstrates the stakes involved. The CBSE has decided to outsource some of the security related issues to a third party. In December 2017 it floated a tender for a third party audit of its infrastructure including all process and security at exam centres for the joint entrance examination for the IIT (main) examination this year. 

In this context the promise by finance minister Arun Jaitley in Budget 2017-18 to set up a National Testing Agency is sound. NTA will conduct entrance examinations for higher educational institutions organised by the CBSE, AICTE and other bodies. But it will need a fat purse besides the one-time grant of Rs 250 million offered by the Central government. The state has to spend far more to enable public examinations to offer a fair deal for the millions of students. Botched exams ruin the faith of young adults in merit-based outcomes.