The Exam Factory: How Centralized Admissions Are Reshaping Indian Education—and Its Seemingly Not for the Better
When Merit Becomes a Marketplace India’s centralized entrance examinations—JEE for engineering, NEET for medicine, and CUET for central universities—were introduced with an admirable goal: creating a fair, transparent, and merit-based system of admissions. In a country long plagued by opaque admission processes, donation-based seats, and regional disparities, a single national examination appeared to be a How India’s centralized exams like JEE, NEET, and CUET transformed education into a high-stakes competition, fueling coaching culture, privatization, inequality, and challenges to innovation and creativity.
