The recent protests over examination failures mean that the government now has a rare political mandate to bring substantial reforms in the entrance examination system. Let’s not waste it.
The temptation will be to only focus on examination security: better technology, tighter protocols, more stringent punishment and greater accountability. Those reforms are necessary, but they address a technical and operationally tractable problem that has been solved elsewhere. India should use this moment to ask a more fundamental question: what should a national entrance examination actually do? We have a golden opportunity for first-principles thinking.
There is historical logic to how we got to the current system. Common examinations were introduced to address failures in university admissions and fairly allocate scarce seats. India has an extraordinarily unequal and fragmented school system. Students come from different boards, schools and states, with marks that are often difficult to compare. Decentralised admissions also created opportunities for discretion, capitation fees, inconsistent standards and institutional malpractice. Centralised examinations supposedly offered a common, trusted benchmark against which a student from an unknown government school could demonstrate capability alongside a student from an elite urban school.
But as is often the case in the pendulum-swinging nature of government policy, India moved toward the other extreme: enormous centralisation of selection. One examination can now be asked to establish whether a student is academically capable, rank that student against lakhs of others, and allocate extremely scarce opportunities.
Eligibility, not rank
Here is a balanced alternative to the two extremes. We could retain a national examination while changing the question it answers. How? The creation of a unified National Higher Education Eligibility Assessment. Instead of asking, “Where do you rank among everyone who took this examination?”, it would ask, “Have you demonstrated the capabilities necessary to pursue this field of study?”
The assessment could measure competencies such as mathematical reasoning, scientific reasoning, reading and interpretation, quantitative problem-solving, evidence and argumentation, and the ability to apply knowledge in unfamiliar contexts. The goal here is not to separate the top students from the rest, but to establish the competencies each student has demonstrated. The assessment may therefore be more cognitively demanding, because it asks students to think, not rote-learn, while being less competitively difficult, because it does not need to construct a bell curve. This is consistent with the competency-based direction India has already embarked on through NEP 2020.
Instead of a national rank, score or percentile, students would receive a transcript of their competency bands — perhaps from 0 to 5 that shows their current demonstrated levels of achievement in those specific competencies.
Now, Academic and professional bodies could establish the competency profiles required for their specific fields of study. Engineering might require particular levels of mathematical and scientific reasoning; history might place greater weight on interpretation and argumentation. Now, suddenly, a student could qualify for several fields at once, opening up their career choices.
Students could take individual competency assessments multiple times and retain their highest demonstrated bands. Universities would see the bands, not the raw scores. All students meeting the requirements of a particular field of study would enter a national eligibility pool. At that point, the national examination has finished its job. Universities would then select their students for that field of study only from that pool.
University admissions
How would universities select these students? At the onset, institutions should be prohibited from simply creating another dominant high-stakes examination, which would replace a few national entrance tests with hundreds of mini-exams and defeat the purpose. The national eligibility threshold establishes a floor: every candidate an institution considers has already demonstrated the academic capability required for that field. Instead, universities now have the opportunity and autonomy to be creative, and use their admission processes as a market differentiator. They might use student work portfolios, structured interviews, demonstrations, practical tasks, essays, school achievement, contextual information, lotteries or combinations of approaches.
But with autonomy comes accountability: admissions processes would have to be published in advance and auditable. Institutions would need to report aggregate admissions and student outcomes, including appropriate demographic breakdowns, without publishing individual student records. Over time, universities would develop genuine admissions departments, expertise and institutional knowledge rather than outsourcing the definition of merit entirely to a national rank.
School reform
Let us now examine the potential upstream benefits. A new form of examination and admission process would create an important pressure for school reform that is currently missing. One might argue that the school education system is not “broken” as is often lamented, but is actually perfectly designed toward the wrong goals. High-stakes assessments inevitably influence what happens in classrooms. Today, entrance examinations exert enormous backward pressure on secondary education because students and teachers know what ultimately determines opportunity.
So, let us change those goals. If portfolios, projects, demonstrations and broader competencies begin to matter for higher education, state education departments and private schools will have to ensure that these opportunities exist within their classrooms as part of normal curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. This is powerful positive washback into schooling. If national eligibility instead rewards mathematical reasoning, scientific reasoning, interpretation, argumentation and transfer, schools have a much stronger incentive to teach those things seriously. Admissions reform could finally align the aspirations of NEP with the incentives students actually face.
The Coaching Industry
It would be unrealistic to imagine that admissions reform will make private tuition disappear. The sector is deeply entrenched, economically significant and politically powerful. Moreover, it is an open secret that some of the country’s strongest teaching talent works in coaching institutions. What if now that talent begins competing to develop genuine mathematical reasoning or scientific problem solving?
Part of today’s coaching demand exists because competitive ranking creates enormous returns to marginal improvements in examination performance. An eligibility system reduces that incentive. Once a student has demonstrated the required competency band, further optimisation of an invisible raw score produces no admissions advantage, reducing both student stress and the pressure to trade years of potentially enjoyable, balanced and holistic schooling for expensive, grinding, competitive coaching.
There will always be a legitimate market for supplementary education. A student may want advanced mathematics, music instruction, additional tutoring or support for a specialised pathway. The distinction is whether coaching is an optional enrichment or something a child effectively needs because either the admissions system or the school system has failed her. Let us not get distracted by a head-on, politically fraught war of destroying the coaching industry, however tempting it seems. Rather, a more successful strategy could be to make coaching progressively less necessary for accessing opportunity so that its importance diminishes naturally.
Also read: India’s education system suffers from a mafia problem. More laws is not the solution
Implementation
The National Testing Agency (NTA) could develop two clearly separated arms: an Assessment Research and Design function responsible for competency frameworks, psychometrics, proficiency bands, validity and standard-setting; and an Examination Operations function responsible for technology, centres, logistics, security and administration. NTA’s existing mandate already encompasses research-based assessment as well as test delivery, making this a strengthening of its purpose rather than an entirely new institution.
Alongside it, India could create an independent Common Application Utility through which students receive their competency transcripts, understand where they are eligible, apply to multiple institutions and manage offers on a common national calendar. Keeping this platform autonomous and outside government could also reduce data privacy concerns about creating another central government repository of students’ educational histories and university choices.
None of this can be done overnight. The eligibility assessment could first run alongside existing examinations, piloted with a small group of eminent, progressive universities willing to offer a proportion of their seats through the new system. Successive phases of testing, feedback and redesign could then allow the model to expand gradually, giving universities time to build capacity and parents, students and schools time to adapt both their expectations and their practices.
There is much to learn from other countries, both about what to borrow and what to avoid, from examples such as PISA, the IB and systems that have worked or failed in other developing and developed nations. But India should not import any of these systems wholesale. It should learn from others, weave together elements that have worked, and redesign them for Indian scale, inequality, institutional capacity and public trust.
The deeper philosophy behind this reform is a separation of responsibilities. The assessment should establish competence. Public policy should protect equity. Universities should exercise judgement about the students they want to teach. Students should exercise choice about where they want to go. A well-thought-out national assessment can be both a great equaliser and a great reformer of Indian education.
Karishma Shanghvi is Director of the Shikha Institute, where she leads translational research and development in education reform. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)