Centre Urges States to Help Stop Exam Paper Leaks: In order to maintain the integrity of its entrance exams, the Union government has contacted the states for assistance.
In order to get their help in supervising the administration of impending exams, including as the Foreign Medical Graduate Exam (FMGE) on July 6 and the All India Ayush Postgraduate Entrance Test (AIAPGET), Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla met with all state Chief Secretaries and DGPs last week.
Admissions to MD/MS programmes in Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha, and Homoeopathy are made by the AIAPGET, which is administered by the National Testing Agency (NTA) on behalf of the Ayush Ministry. The FMGE is a biennial examination administered by the Health Ministry’s National Board of Examination (NBE) to foreign medical graduates who wish to practise in India. Last year, slightly less than one lakh applicants took the two exams. They are both computer-based tests.
According to reports, Bhalla asked the states to designate a civil and a police observer for every exam centre in their respective states in order to help offer an extra layer of monitoring for the exams. It is the duty of an observer to make sure the test is impartial and devoid of any irregularities.
States were also requested to designate a single nodal officer at the state level to act in tandem with the organisation in charge of administering the exam.
Currently, the organisation in charge of administering the exam assigns one observer to each testing location. For example, the NTA would typically designate one observer per centre for AIAPGET.
However, the government has been obliged to reassess its processes for all admission tests due to issues surrounding the validity of various entrance exams that are administered centrally, including multiple arrests linked to the purported leak of the NEET-UG paper.
Over the course of the last two weeks, a number of high-level discussions have been held at the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Education Ministry, the Cabinet Secretariat, and the Ministry of Home Affairs. The decision was made to have three or more observers present at each exam centre rather than just one.
Therefore, it has been determined that the parent ministry and the state in question will both have a representative in addition to the observer chosen by the organisation in charge of delivering the exam. Thus, in the instance of AIAPGET, there will be state observers (police and civil), an AYUSH observer (parent ministry), and an NTA observer (examination agency), according to a Chief Secretary present at the conference that took place during the final week of June.
The decision to have numerous observers was made because, according to insiders, “oversight from different quarters would neutralise vested interests, if any.”
On behalf of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), NTA conducted a pilot programme for the All India Entrance Exam for Admission (AIEEA PG) and ICAR-AICE-JRF/SRF on June 29. The purpose of the pilot programme was to test applicants for admission to master’s and research programmes, respectively, in recognised agricultural universities. In addition to the NTA observer, ICAR has assigned one observer to each exam centre for this exam.
The Home Secretary’s meeting follows a wave of accusations and disputes regarding the validity of the NEET undergraduate entrance exam, as well as the Center’s decision to postpone the CSIR-UGC NET and cancel the UGC-NET due to suspected paper leaks.
The Education Ministry has maintained that there was no widespread leak of the NEET-UG paper and has not cancelled it, although acknowledging credible evidence of a paper leak for UGC-NET, which is why it opted to withdraw the paper. Only 17 candidates in Bihar have actually been disqualified by NTA for allegedly profiting from what Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan referred to as a “localised error” the day before the test.
But when Pradhan accepted moral responsibility for the issues the medical entrance candidates faced, the Education Ministry established a reforms committee to recommend ways to enhance the NTA examination procedure.
In the midst of the scandal, NTA Chief Subodh Kumar Singh—who oversaw the holding of NEET-UG and UGC-NET—was removed from the agency and placed on mandatory leave in the Department of Personnel and Training.
Since then, the government’s plan to prevent paper leaks during upcoming exams has been reviewed at a number of high-level meetings presided over by Principal Secretary to Prime Minister P K Mishra, Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Guaba, and Home Minister Amit Shah.
