India wants to tap technology to prevent exam paper leaks, but experts say it’s not so simple

KUALA LUMPUR, 17 AUGUST 2026 —

India’s government has appointed Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani to lead a task force on technology reforms for the National Testing Agency (NTA) after a leaked paper for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) plunged the country into crisis.

The Central Bureau of Investigation has arrested 13 people, including three NTA subject experts, coaching-centre operators and middlemen, in a multi-state conspiracy linked to the breach. Investigators describe it as a coordinated operation across several states.

Security experts say the leak exposed a fundamental flaw in India’s exam system: reliance on a single confidential paper taken by millions on the same day. “A paper-based national exam has a long physical chain of custody,” said cybersecurity researcher Sai Krishna. “Question setters, printing presses, transport contractors, storage facilities, district officials and examination centres each become a human trust point. A single compromised insider anywhere in that chain can defeat the entire system.”

Historical exam leaks in India have almost always come from insiders in printing, transport or examination centres, rather than sophisticated cyberattacks, Krishna said. Almost every major breach has originated from human custody points, not digital intrusions.

Former Ministry of Education secretary R Subrahmanyam told CNA the problem is structural. “It is a design problem,” he said. “While online exams would help, what is needed is to look at the assessment system as a whole.” In a July 2026 policy paper, Subrahmanyam proposed replacing high-stakes exams like NEET with multiple test dates and dynamically generated papers of equivalent difficulty so that leaking one paper would have far less impact.

Wally Dalrymple, chief security officer at US-based Educational Testing Service (ETS), which runs exams such as the GRE and TOEFL, said technology alone cannot solve the integrity issue. “Computer-based testing by itself doesn’t solve the integrity problem, it just relocates it,” he said.

“The countries that do this well have moved past the idea that any single fix will solve the problem.” ETS uses large question banks and adaptive testing to reduce the value of any single compromised set.

China treats undistributed exam papers as state secrets, transporting them under police escort, GPS-tracked vehicles and multiple handover checks. Authorities impose severe penalties for leaks, including up to seven years’ imprisonment for organised cheating. During this year’s gaokao, China temporarily disabled AI features from major tech firms—including ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba—during exam hours to deter cheating.

In the United States, exams such as the GRE use computer-based testing that pulls questions from large banks, so candidates receive different but equivalent versions. Many also use adaptive testing, where question difficulty changes based on a candidate’s answers, making it harder for any single leak to undermine the entire exam.

Krishna said India should combine China’s rigorous chain-of-custody practices with the US approach of distributing risk across multiple question sets. “The objective should be to design examinations in which no single paper can compromise the entire process,” he said.

For Malaysian business readers, the crisis highlights how systemic vulnerabilities in high-stakes exams can ripple through education markets, coaching industries and technology sectors, affecting investment and policy decisions in related fields.

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