The problem isn’t just exam leaks — it is too many exams

The Prime Minister’s high-powered task force on examination reforms, under Nandan Nilekani, arrives at a moment of deep public distrust. The immediate priority is to ensure examinations cannot be compromised. The larger opportunity, however, is to ask a different question — are we asking students to prove themselves in the best possible way? Because an examination can be perfectly secure and still be badly designed.

There are several problems with the current organisation of examinations. First, students are expected to navigate multiple high-stakes examinations, each offering only a single opportunity to succeed. Second, even those who perform well may not secure a seat simply because demand far exceeds supply. While some degree of competition is inevitable in a country of India’s size, the cumulative effect of these features is a system that repeatedly concentrates uncertainty, pressure, and disappointment into a few decisive moments. It is, therefore, unsurprising that population-level increases in anxiety, depressive symptoms, disrupted sleep, and emotional distress accompany examination seasons. Yet these outcomes are often framed as individual failures of resilience rather than predictable consequences of how the system is designed. No number of resilience workshops, counselling helplines, or motivational campaigns can solve a problem whose primary cause is structural rather than personal.
India should redesign its examination system around the student journey, ensuring that structural reforms are guided not only by efficiency and integrity, but also by evidence, compassion, and an understanding of how policy shapes futures.

Firstly, India should replace today’s overlapping examination system with a simpler two-part model: Board examinations to certify school learning, and a common admissions assessment to measure readiness for higher education. The assessment would test core competencies such as critical reading, quantitative reasoning, data interpretation, and analytical communication, alongside broad subject modules where necessary. Its purpose is to measure demonstrated readiness, not fixed aptitude. Board examinations, meanwhile, should provide meaningful evidence of curricular achievement rather than function as a second admissions test. Institutions should be permitted to add their own assessments only where they demonstrate clear incremental value. An architecture programme may require a design task; a dance school, an audition. But additional examinations should not exist simply because institutions prefer them. They should measure capabilities not already captured by the common assessment, and their benefits should justify the financial and psychological burden they impose on students.

Secondly, the common assessment should be offered several times a year so that a single illness, family emergency, or technical failure does not determine a student’s future. It should be delivered through a dense network of centres, allowing most candidates to travel to and from the test on the same day, and be available in English and all 22 Eighth Schedule languages. Translation alone is insufficient; assessments must be developed and validated across languages to ensure they measure the same capabilities fairly. Multiple sittings should improve access, not create opportunities for repeated score optimisation. One attempt should suffice, with a publicly funded second sitting available where genuinely needed. Institutions should not know how many attempts a student has taken, and scores should remain valid across more than one admissions cycle.

Thirdly, examination results should be reported in broad readiness bands rather than exact scores and national ranks. The differences between neighbouring candidates are often too small to justify the precision implied by a numerical rank, yet those tiny differences can determine thousands of places in the admissions queue. Reporting readiness bands better reflect what the assessment can reliably distinguish while reducing the illusion of false precision. Allocation within a band should follow transparent, pre-announced rules, drawing on existing reservation policies and candidate preferences. The testing authority can retain continuous scores for technical purposes, but institutions should receive only a readiness band and a capability profile. A rank tells a student she was worse than forty thousand other people. A readiness band tells her she was ready.

Lastly, the examination system should bear the costs of its own failures rather than transferring them to students and their families. Examination leaks, cancellations, and major administrative failures should trigger pre-announced protocols: Timely communication, automatic refunds, travel support where required, a guaranteed replacement examination within a defined period, and independent grievance redress. Institutional failure should not become another preparation cycle, another financial burden, or another season of uncertainty for families that did nothing wrong.

These reforms are not exhaustive, but they illustrate a broader principle: Every change to the examination system should improve the student experience — logistically, emotionally, and materially.

The task force is well placed to strengthen examination security, digital delivery, and institutional accountability. Its greater opportunity, however, is to establish a different ethic for assessment, one that requires students to demonstrate necessary capabilities as few times as possible; make every assessment geographically and linguistically accessible; avoid distinctions more precise than the evidence can support; ensure institutions bear the costs of their own failures; and treat the scarcity of seats as an allocation problem rather than a judgement of human worth.

India does not merely need examinations that cannot be leaked. It needs an examination system that is fit for purpose, fair in the burdens it imposes, and designed around the lives of the students and families it serves.

Bhargava is a mental health researcher. Mor is visiting scientist, Banyan Academy of Leadership in Mental Health