The National Testing Agency (NTA) should conduct annual audits of who succeeds in NEET, JEE-Main and CUET across states, genders, school boards, mediums of instruction and social categories, a parliamentary panel has recommended, flagging gaps in the agency’s data on examination outcomes.
It also called for a secure channel to receive information and complaints relating to all aspects of examinations, and an independent mechanism, operating separately from NTA, with the power to audit examination security protocols, investigate candidate grievances, and report directly to the education ministry. It also called for a regulatory framework covering fee transparency, safety standards and students’ mental health. “Only a student from a well-resourced family can spend two years in any of the coaching institutions, paying anywhere between ₹ 2 lakh and ₹ 5 lakh a year, essentially preparing for one examination.
The panel recommended an annual “Equity Audit” examining participation, pass and cutoff achievement rates in each major examination, broken down by state, gender, school board type — government, aided, and private — medium of instruction, and social category, including OBC, SC, ST, EWS, and general candidates. The panel said the coaching industry had created a “parallel curriculum that often matters more than the official school curriculum”. It said examination papers that go beyond the NCERT or state-board syllabus, or reward “rapid recall and pattern-recognition developed through repetitive practice rather than genuine conceptual understanding”, inevitably favour coaching over learning. Such design choices, it said, had helped create a “large, largely unregulated private coaching industry” that had displaced school-level learning as the primary site of preparation. belonging to a poor or lower middle class family simply does not have that option, i.e. access to money, to infrastructure, and to a coaching ecosystem that the school system cannot offer,” the committee said While an equally talented and hardworking student. The panel recommended that the education ministry set “specific, measurable standards” to ensure that NEET, JEE-Main, and CUET tests assess conceptual understanding based on the official school curriculum, rather than on coaching-specific techniques.
