Six hundred examiners entered the examination hall. Unfortunately, the examination body failed all of them.

The NTA has reportedly removed six hundred experts following examination controversies and ordered multiple layers of checking. NTA stands for the National Testing Agency. It is an organisation established by the Government of India to conduct major entrance and eligibility examinations, including NEET, JEE Main, CUET and UGC NET.

This is excellent news. Until now, only students were expected to pass examinations. At last, the examiners have been asked to sit for one.

I imagine the question paper was difficult.

Question One: If a student studies for two years, spends his parents’ savings on coaching, travels four hundred kilometres to an examination centre, and then discovers that the paper was leaked, calculate the speed at which his faith in the system disappears.

The experts probably asked for extra sheets.

Question Two: A government says the examination is fair. Ten thousand students say it is not. Police arrive and remove the students. Who has passed the test?

The official answer was probably, “The police.”

Outside, the students were agitating. Some had slept on pavements. Some had gone hungry. Some had been dragged away for demanding what should never have required a protest: an honest examination.

Inside, a committee may have been studying the matter. In India, whenever a problem becomes too large to solve, we give it chairs, tea, biscuits and a committee room. By the time the report appears, the students have grown old enough to apply for the committee.

Now six hundred experts have been removed. That is a very large number. One wonders whether the NTA employed experts or organised a wedding reception. Did nobody notice that six hundred people were needed to produce one trustworthy question paper?

Perhaps expertise had become like examination marks. The more you printed, the more impressive it looked.

Multiple layers of checking have now been introduced. Wonderful. We shall have a checker, a checker of the checker, and a senior checker who checks whether the first two checkers checked. If anything still goes wrong, another committee will check why all the checking remained unchecked.

The students were not asking for grace marks. They were asking the nation to keep its word. Yet the answer they received was barricades, batons, silence and assurances from committees.

But behind the joke stands an angry young student holding a useless admit card and asking a serious question: “Can I trust you?”

That question is larger than the NTA. An examination does more than measure knowledge. It creates a promise of competence. A certificate carries that promise into the world. Examination fraud breaks that promise.

Before examining our children again, let the system answer one final question.

How is it, that it required agitating students for this government to finally realise after twelve years that they had six hundred misfits working as examiners?

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