New Delhi: The all-party parliamentary standing committee on education has slammed the National Testing Agency (NTA) and said that its performance in the last year has “not inspired much confidence.”

At present the NTA, which was established in 2018, has the mandate of conducting major examinations including the JEE (Main) for admission to undergraduate engineering programs in the NITs and other prestigious engineering institutions and the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (Undergraduate) (NEET-UG) for undergraduate medical college admissions.

“It has been brought to the notice of the Committee that in the 3 year 2024 alone, of the 14 competitive examinations conducted by the NTA, at least five faced major issues and as result, three examinations viz. UGC-NET, CSIR-NET and NEET-PG had to be postponed, one examination viz. NEET-UG saw instances of paper leaks, and one examination i.e CUET ( UG/PG) saw its results postponed,” the Committee has said in its report.

The report added that in JEE Main 2025 held in January 2025, at least 12 questions had to be withdrawn due to errors noted in the final answer key of the engineering entrance exam.

The Committee added in its report that such instances do not inspire confidence of the examinees in the system.

“The Committee therefore recommends that NTA need to quickly get their act together so that such instances, which otherwise are fully avoidable, do not occur in future. The Committee notes that several firms involved in paper setting, administration, and correction have been blacklisted by one organisation/state government but that this however, is not impeding their securing of contracts from other states or organisations,” says the report.

Congress MP Digvijaya Singh, the chairman of the Committee took to X on Monday (December 8) and shared a list of its recommendations.

“The Committee notes that the NTA collected an estimated Rs. 3,512.98 Crores while it has spent Rs. 3,064.77 Crores on the conduct of examinations thereby creating a surplus of Rs. 448 Crores in the last six years. The Committee recommends that this corpus should be used to build the agency’s capabilities to conduct tests itself, or to strengthen regulatory and monitoring capabilities for its vendors,” says the report.

The Committee also recommended that that NTA puts a greater emphasis on pen-and-paper testing after noting there are several models of such examinations which have been leak-proof for several years – including the CBSE exams and the UPSC exams.

In the case of computer-based tests (CBT), the Committee recommended that these exams be hosted only in government or government-controlled centres and never in private centres.

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