Recipe for disaster: NTA handles 25 public exams with less than 25 permanent staff members

The agency has outsourced paper-setting, paper distribution and data security protocols to external experts, including private technical service providers, according to former education administrators and higher education faculty familiar with the NTA’s operations

Some of the accused arrested in connection with the NEET-UG case hide their faces from the media in Patna on Sunday.: PTI picture.

G.S. Mudur, Basant Kumar Mohanty, TT, New Delhi, 24.06.24 :  The National Testing Agency handles 25 public exams with less than 25 permanent staff members, according to education domain experts, one of whom said the Centre had gambled with the exams by directing the agency “to bite more than it was intended to chew”.

The agency, handicapped by inadequate in-house expertise, has outsourced paper-setting, paper distribution and data security protocols to external experts, including private technical service providers, according to former education administrators and higher education faculty familiar with the NTA’s operations.

The Union education ministry last week blamed “institutional failure” for alleged irregularities in the NEET for undergraduate medical admission and a paper leak in the NET, held for PhD admissions and the recruitment of assistant professors to colleges. The NTA had conducted both exams.

The NTA also conducts the JEE Main for admission to engineering colleges across the country, the Common Management Admission Test for admission into management institutes, and the Common University Entrance Test for general courses at central universities.

“The agency was envisaged to be a professional, lean, efficient entity, provided with posts essential for the conduct of only online exams with competent and credible technical partners,” said R. Subrahmanyam, former secretary with the education ministry’s higher education department.

The Centre established the NTA in September 2018 to create an agency on the lines of the Educational Testing Service (ETS) in the US, a private testing and assessment body that administers the Scholastic Aptitude Test and the Graduate Record Examination for college and university admission.

But while the ETS has more than 200 employees, the NTA has only about a dozen officials on deputation from other government departments and temporary employees on fixed-term contracts.

Education administrators familiar with the NTA’s operations say that major tasks including the encryption and decryption of question papers are outsourced to private agencies.

“The idea was to keep the NTA lean on staff but high in credibility. Since online testing involves high levels of information technology architecture and robust digital security, it was contemplated to work with technical partners well versed in such operations,” Subrahmanyam told The Telegraph.

He said tasks such as the preparation of the test centres and the transmission of question papers to the test centres after encryption, through secure digital networks, are done with the help of technical partners. In the early years, the partner technical agency was Tata Consultancy Services, he said.

“The technical partner is selected through a rigorous process…. Among the prime considerations while selecting the agency are the depth of the IT infrastructure and the cybersecurity protocols,” Subrahmanyam said.

But sections of university faculty asked by the NTA to set question papers are concerned about what some of them described as “potential loopholes” that unscrupulous people could exploit to compromise the integrity of the exams.

Subrahmanyam and others are also concerned about the NTA’s entry into pen-and-paper tests. The NTA was initially intended to conduct only online exams but the NEET has from this year become a pen-and-paper test.

For the pen-and-paper tests, question papers are printed at private printing presses selected by the agency. “The printing process is manual and vulnerable to leaks -- this is why the NTA had initially focused on computer-based online tests,” Subrahmanyam said.

N. Sukumar, a professor of political science at Delhi University, said the controversies surrounding the alleged irregularities in the NEET and the paper leak in the NET may have eroded students’ and parents’ trust in the NTA.

Sukumar and a faculty member at a central science institution said it was irresponsible of the NTA to take on new exams, including pen-and-paper tests, without adequate in-house expertise to ensure exam integrity.

“The Centre has in a way gambled with the exams by directing the NTA to bite more than it was intended to chew,” Sukumar said.

“I believe the NTA needs to be scrapped and the government must make efforts to protect the future of the students by ensuring exam integrity through well-equipped government institutions.”

He said the Centre cannot evade its responsibility by blaming institutions or individuals. The Centre had on Saturday removed the NTA director-general, the move viewed widely in academic circles as an effort to pass the buck.