Indian students won a hard-fought battle and secured a high-profile resignation. “Now what?” is the question on everyone’s mind. The pitfalls of India’s examination system are now sharply visible, but questioning what an exam does could be pertinent before deciding what to do about it. India’s competitive exams have a range of social functions. It is an institution that allows for people and their performances to be measured, made legible, evaluated and ranked – an exceptionally resilient institution for governance and administration. For a government, it allows for the attestation of competence, regulation of competition, defining content and broadly controlling education systems, the 4 Cs of exams. For an individual, it mediates aspirations for social mobility, carries the promise of neutrality and a level playing field and, theoretically, allows for the redistribution of scarce opportunities. One of the biggest achievements of any exam is to render the taker an anonymous individual and turn her into a case that can be classified and ranked, making her more governable. That is, it converts a person into a file, with numbers and data against them.India’s competitive exams have performed strongly on the 4 Cs from a governmental perspective but have significantly failed from an individual’s perspective. The recent leak of the NEET paper was the final straw that broke the camel’s back and led to one of the most successful protests in recent history, culminating in the resignation of the education minister. It has become abundantly clear to the hundreds of thousands of students protesting across the country that these entrance exams were not neutral; they were not a level playing field and that they insidiously rewarded the already privileged. What do competitive exams really measure?The recent protests by fellow cockroaches have brought long-standing questions about India’s competitive exams sharply into the limelight. What do competitive entrance exams like the UPSC, NEET or the JEE claim to measure and what do they actually measure? Does it reward meritorious achievement or does it reward potential? If it were to reward achievement, then it should measure effort. Lakhs of students spend years, day and night, studying for these exams; does the difference of a few marks measure a lack of effort? If it were to reward potential, then the amount of effort should be meaningless and the exam should be able to detect talent with minimal effort. Moreover, where do competitive exams sit in a democracy, where all are supposedly equal, but the exam explicitly ranks people and allocates life chances unequally? Should equality in the polling booth be supplemented by aristocracy in vocation? A history of high-stakes testingExaminations are not a new feature of societies. Systematic competitive exams date back almost 1,100 years to the reunification of China under the Sung dynasty, which developed detailed examination systems to recruit people into the civil service. Its contemporary rendition is called the Gaokao, a nationwide competitive exam taken by 10 million students across a variety of subjects to gain admission to China’s higher education institutions. Similar high-stakes mass competitive exams are conducted in Vietnam, South Korea, Japan and Singapore and the cultural narratives remain similar: high suicide rates, exam cultures characterised by rote memorisation, flourishing private coaching industries and family and intergenerational relations mediated through the education system and exams. Europe boarded the competitive examination train relatively late; examinations first appeared in the 19th century and the first instance of England having a competitive exam was the Indian Civil Service exam, started in 1855. The stated purpose of these exams was to remove the stranglehold of the landed aristocracy in positions of power and allow for the “educated” to occupy such positions. It is no accident that 70% of the Indian Civil Service comprised graduates from Oxford and Cambridge.Also read: Beyond NEET: When India’s Examination System Becomes a Crisis of TrustMuch like the Gaokao, European examinations asked candidates to demonstrate proficiency in literature, language, history and philosophy and were largely summative, essay-based exams, not the objective ones that current versions of India’s multiple entrance exams are, which use multiple-choice questions. A vexing feature of all such exams is that the answer one provides to a question then becomes a proxy indicator of one’s potential, an incoherent, indirect mapping of one’s effort and one’s potential. For example, a candidate’s answer to a question in differential algebra becomes an indicator of her potential to be a good doctor. One of India’s most noted sociologists, Satish Deshpande, highlighted this pithily: that this dissonance of what is being measured requires great ideological energy to build up prestige and deference for such exams. To mask this dissonance in such high-stakes, winner-takes-all competitions competitive exams across the world serve as instruments to launder their own credibility and as an effective way for aspirants to consent to their own exclusion, becoming willing participants in a system where their success is a statistical improbability. Missing the structural problemExams are paradoxical institutions, but calls to ban exams like NEET are to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Exams are messengers; they serve to signal something about someone. Rage against exams masks the structural features that make the exams unfair, including stark inequality in the quality of school education in India and socio-economic factors like caste, gender and religion that prevent people from accessing educational opportunities. Calls for reforms in education and assessment have repeatedly fallen prey to technocratic solutions, such as the recent move to digitalise question papers and to solve issues that arise in the system through criminal law. I hope to bring some different perspectives, grounded in both pragmatic and “political” considerations. Can a lottery be fairer than ranking?It is a starkly visible reality that the lottery of one’s birth in India determines one’s chances in life. If the constitution understands all citizens as equals, then why can’t an exam be organised around these two realities: all Indians are equals and that the birth lottery determines chances, by setting a particular threshold for a score in an exam and then making access to all institutions a lottery? For example, all those who score 50% or more in their school exams at a particular grade, based on their explicitly stated interest in a course of their choice, enter a lottery for access to higher education institutions. Of course, this only shifts the threshold, as there are millions of children who are disempowered from accessing quality education through no fault of their own. India’s architecture of affirmative action can be especially useful here, where the threshold can be adjudicated based on one’s caste, class, gender, religious and geographical location and closely tied to the quality of schooling. This is by no means an original thought and has significant philosophical precedent dating back to Aristotle in Athenian democracy. There is detailed research across philosophy, economics, sociology and political science showing that variance above a specific educational threshold does not measure anything that a higher education institution should care about. The Netherlands used a procedure called gewogen loting (weighted lottery) for almost 40 years, starting in the 1970s, to allocate medical seats. The United States H1-B visa also follows the same principle. It is useful to adapt and borrow from Mark Fisher here, who wrote that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. In India, it seems easier to imagine the end of Indian society than to imagine changes in ideals of meritocracy. Such is the ideological strength of the myth of merit. It is under the crushing weight of this monolith that thousands of students have died by suicide and been institutionally murdered inside India’s premier institutions.Lessons from Latin AmericaCompetitive exams in South and South-East Asia are fundamentally high-stakes exams. A few hours determine one’s life for the next few decades and carry immense moral and political weight. Exams in different parts of the world, especially in Latin America, are pivoting towards low-stakes, socio-culturally responsive, personalised assessments. Chile, for example, now allows candidates to take exams at different times, has stopped treating entrance exam scores as the sole gatekeeping instrument and has made it one of several other weighted factors. It is entirely possible to reimagine exams in India by changing their frequency (to multiple times a year), by factoring in reversibility (that it is possible to overcome a bad score), by targeting their scope (the weight on a candidate’s future) and with the exam result applicable to multiple institutions and streams rather than just one. In Brazil, the Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio (ENEM) provides a portable, system-wide score that feeds into a national matching system across public and private universities and is also used to access scholarship schemes. While it remains a high-stakes exam, the stakes are more evenly distributed.Decentralised educationHigh-stakes examinations in India have been centralised for too long. Exam reform necessarily includes reimagining federal relations. If India really is a union of states, then states should have power to determine how to fairly distribute educational opportunities. Decentralising education necessarily means decentralising power from the union to the states over what to teach, how to teach, what to assess and how to sort.Also read: The National Testing Agency Has Failed its ExamsBut decentralising power remains meaningless if public and private school teachers are imagined in policy as tools for implementation. Federalism cannot be just about an interplay of power between the union and the states; it must also extend to relations of power and accountability between school autonomy and accountability. Teachers, not technocrats, should be given the primary task of determining how best to run schools, which becomes redundant when teachers are treated as arms of the state, continuously deputed to conduct elections, delete people from voter rolls and perform enumeration activities. Such an idea is also not without precedent, with successive Dravidian governments in Tamil Nadu having long called for state autonomy and achieving relative success. The problem, however, remains that power is sought to be devolved from Delhi to Chennai, not to schools and teachers. Impact of AINone of the reflections above address the elephant in the room: Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), which presents both significant opportunities and threats to education and assessment. In the current context, it is making the current method of competitive exams redundant. I accessed the 2026 NEET paper, opened the physics section and typed out the question on Google Gemini. It provided the correct answer in under 3 seconds. Essentially, current forms of competitive examinations have lost all relevance for assessment and are serving a social and political role: sorting a population using outdated and irrelevant indicators. It is now akin to conducting a national tournament that asks young students to give blood and be sorted in society for something that takes three seconds to answer. Educational assessment is a key interface between education and society; for far too long it has been deemed to be outside of politics. Education and assessment are the most basic forms of politics that affect every person in society. Political solutions, with decisions being made by equal voters at the ballot box and political parties as intermediaries, need to be included in expert-backed policy solutions for education and assessment. Until then, piecemeal solutions involving technocrats and directors of institutions that extoll the virtue of cow-urine will only serve to dissolve existing tensions, not solve them. Vishal Vasanthakumar is finishing his PhD in Sociology at the University of Cambridge and is the author of The Smart and The Dumb: The Politics of Education in India published by Penguin Randomhouse. He received no foreign funding for this article.