As India seeks to prevent exam paper leaks, what can it learn from other countries?

KUALA LUMPUR, 17 AUGUST 2026 —

India’s biggest medical entrance exam leak left at least 20 students dead and sparked mass protests that forced the education minister to resign.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has appointed a task force led by Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys and architect of the Aadhaar digital identity project, to recommend tech reforms. The panel will assess whether technology can secure exams or if the entire system needs redesign.

Experts argue the leak exposed a fundamental flaw: a system built around a single high-stakes paper, a long human chain of custody, and fragmented accountability that can be broken by a single insider.

“The countries that do this well have moved past the idea that any single fix will solve the problem,” said Wally Dalrymple, chief security officer at Educational Testing Service (ETS), the US-based organisation behind examinations such as the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL).

India’s top police investigative agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation, has already arrested 13 people, including three NTA subject experts, coaching-centre operators, and middlemen. Investigators describe the leak as a multi-state conspiracy.

Yet while the criminal probe focuses on who leaked the paper, experts say India should redesign the assessment system so that no single breach can derail millions of futures.

“It is a design problem,” said R Subrahmanyam, former secretary of India’s Ministry of Education and author of a July 2026 policy paper from the Centre for Research in Schemes and Policies (CRISP). His proposal: replace make-or-break exams like NEET with multiple test dates and dynamically generated but equally difficult papers so that the leak of one paper carries far less weight.

Cybersecurity researcher Sai Krishna said India’s physical-paper model is vulnerable because the final exam exists long before students enter the hall. “A paper-based national exam has a long physical chain of custody,” he said. Question setters, printing presses, transport contractors, storage facilities, district officials, and examination centres each add another human trust point. Every handoff can be compromised by a single insider.

Almost every major exam leak in India has originated from printing, transport, or centre staff rather than cyberattacks, Krishna noted. Unlike systems where candidates receive different question sets, India’s largest entrance tests rely on one confidential paper taken by millions on the same day. Compromising one document can undermine the entire examination.

To reduce the value of any single leak, experts suggest combining rigorous custody practices with exam designs that dilute the impact of stolen material. Dalrymple said the best exams make security “nearly invisible to honest test takers and expensive for bad actors.”

China’s gaokao, the world’s largest university entrance exam, treats undistributed papers as top-secret state material. They are printed at authorised facilities, sealed, and transported under police escort, GPS-tracked vehicles, and multiple handover checks. Officials found leaking papers face severe criminal penalties. During this year’s gaokao, authorities temporarily disabled AI features such as photo-based question solving to deter cheating.

Since 2015, China has criminalised organised cheating and exam leaks, with offenders facing up to seven years in prison. Authorities have tightened chain-of-custody rules and expanded surveillance around major state exams after earlier breaches, including a 2015 leak of postgraduate questions and a 2022 case where a candidate photographed a maths paper during the exam.

The United States takes a different route. Examinations like the GRE use computer-based tests that pull questions from a large bank so candidates receive different but equivalent versions. Many also use adaptive testing, where question difficulty changes based on a candidate’s answers, making any single set of questions far less valuable to steal.

Krishna said India should blend China’s rigorous chain-of-custody practices with the US model of reducing the value of stolen material. “The objective should be not merely to punish leaks after they occur,” he said, “but to design examinations in which no single paper can compromise the entire process.”

Subrahmanyam has proposed a nationwide continuous assessment system built by upgrading existing schools and colleges. Until then, the NEET leak has already forced India to confront a fundamental question: Can technology make high-stakes exams more secure, or does the system itself need to be redesigned?