Former UIDAI chairperson and Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani has proposed using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate examination question papers on the day of the test to prevent leaks. His proposal comes months after this year’s NEET-UG, the national entrance test for undergraduate medical courses, was cancelled following a question paper leak. The leak set off protests across the country, which were called off in July after education minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned.
Speaking at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in New Delhi on October 13, Nilekani proposed building a large bank of questions and generating the paper at the last minute, which he said would remove the incentive to sell a predetermined paper.
He also called for expanding computer-based testing (CBT), saying India had 150,000 locations where candidates could take tests. He said the examination reforms committee he heads would address these issues and that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was keen to implement its suggestions.
The exams listed below broadly follow one of two models. Paper exams held once a year are written afresh each time, and in China and South Korea the people who write them are kept in isolation until the exam is over. Computer-based exams draw on banks of questions written and trialled well in advance, so different candidates can get different questions.
US: SAT, ACT and MCAT
American universities use the SAT and the ACT for undergraduate admissions, though neither is compulsory everywhere and policies on test scores vary by university. Medical schools use the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), run by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).
The testing bodies write and trial questions well before they are used. ACT, the body that runs the test of the same name, says each question undergoes at least 16 independent reviews, including checks for bias, and is pretested before it counts towards anyone’s score.
The College Board, which runs the SAT, says its questions go through internal and external expert review and large-scale pretesting on representative samples of test-takers.
Students take the SAT on a laptop or tablet using the College Board’s Bluebook app. Each of its two sections has two modules, and the second module depends on how the student did on the first, so students answer different sets of questions. The MCAT, taken on computer at authorised centres, comes in several versions, or forms, each year. The AAMC converts raw scores to a scale of 472 to 528 and adjusts the conversion for small differences in difficulty between forms, so a score means the same whichever form a candidate took.
China: Gaokao
China’s National College Entrance Examination, the gaokao, is held once a year and plays a central role in university admissions. Candidates take Chinese, mathematics and a foreign language, with other subjects depending on the province.
Teams of university and school teachers set the papers in secure facilities they cannot leave until the exam ends, with no phones and only a monitored landline, according to the state-run China Daily.
The same report says the papers are printed at accredited secure printers, including in prisons, and travel to exam centres in monitored vehicles crewed by exam officials, police and military personnel. At the centres, the papers are stored in steel-reinforced rooms with alarms linked to the police, and opening one needs at least three people, each holding the key to one of its gates.
Exam centres also use identity checks, metal detectors and surveillance.
South Korea: Suneung
South Korea’s College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT), known as the Suneung, is held on one day each November and covers subjects including Korean, mathematics and English.
For the November 2025 sitting, about 500 question writers and reviewers, picked at random from a pool of professors and teachers kept by the state-run Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation, lived at an undisclosed location from October 7 until the exam ended on November 13. Phones and Bluetooth earphones were banned, and internet use was limited to looking up material needed for the questions.
On exam day, South Korea suspended aircraft take-offs and landings for 35 minutes, from 1.05pm to 1.40pm, during the English listening section to minimise noise, and helped candidates reach centres on time.
UK: A-levels and admissions tests
The UK does not have a single entrance exam. Students apply through the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS), and universities weigh A-level results or predicted grades alongside course-specific tests such as the University Clinical Aptitude Test (UCAT) for medicine and dentistry and the Law National Aptitude Test (LNAT).
AQA, one of the main A-level exam boards, starts work on a paper more than 18 months before the exam. A committee of senior examiners writes it, a reviser checks each question, two scrutineers each take the paper as a student would, and an approval committee signs it off. Boards set grade boundaries only once marking is nearly complete. Senior examiners compare scripts near each boundary with the previous year’s standard, and if a paper proves harder, the boundaries go down.
The UCAT, taken on computer, uses a question bank. New questions are written each year at workshops, and every section carries unscored trial questions. Those that perform well statistically join the bank from which the scored versions are built, and each candidate is given one of these versions at random.
Singapore
Singapore’s GCE A-Level is a national examination run jointly by the Singapore Examinations and Assessment Board (SEAB), the Ministry of Education and Cambridge International Education. The SEAB engages Cambridge to set and mark the papers, while the ministry and the board fix curriculum and assessment standards and decide grades in consultation with Cambridge.
Finland: Matriculation examination
Finland’s national matriculation examination, taken at the end of upper-secondary school, qualifies students for higher education. Most university places are now filled on upper-secondary results, including matriculation grades, and a smaller share through entrance exams, which Finland cut from 120 to 9 from 2025.
The Matriculation Examination Board runs the test. According to the University of Jyväskylä, about 40 board members, appointed by the education ministry and assisted by 330 associate members, prepare and assess the tests. For each subject, a group made up mostly of university professors and lecturers writes the questions along with an outline of a good answer.
The exam has been fully computer-based since 2019. Until this year, candidates’ own or school laptops started up from a USB stick supplied by the board, which locked them into the exam system on a school network with no internet access. From the autumn 2026 sitting, candidates instead run the board’s app installed on their laptops, connected by cable to a school exam server with no internet access. Teachers mark the answers first, and the board’s examiners then mark them again.
What could the proposed changes mean for India?
The task force Nilekani heads is examining changes to the National Testing Agency (NTA), which conducts several national entrance examinations.
In July, a Supreme Court bench of Justices PS Narasimha and Alok Aradhe, hearing a petition on moving NEET to computer-based testing, said the transition needed consideration. Justice Narasimha had earlier asked the Centre for an affidavit on how it would make the move and keep data secure, noting that leaks could still occur if data were breached.
Moving an examination of NEET’s size online would also require more testing capacity or multiple sessions.
