The Union Cabinet has approved the creation of a National Testing Agency (NTA) to conduct entrance examinations for higher educational institutions.
Its creation will relieve the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) – which conducts exams like the National Eligibilty-cum-Entrance Test (NEET)– and the All India Council for Technical Education of the burden of conducting entrance tests.
The NTA will begin by conducting exams managed by the CBSE and gradually conduct other examinations too.
Some of the exams which would be conducted by NTA will be JEE Main, NEET UG, UGC NET, CTET, etc..
NTA will ensure that exams have a standardized difficulty level.
It is expected that setting up NTA will help avoid conflicts about varying levels of difficulty in different sets of question paper.
The entrance examinations will be conducted in online mode at least twice a year.
The Centre will give an initial grant of Rs. 25-crore to the NTA to start its operations in the first year. Thereafter, it will be self-sustaining. “Establishment of NTA will benefit about 40 lakh students appearing in various entrance examinations. It will… also bring in high reliability, standardized difficulty level for assessing the aptitude, intelligence and problem solving abilities of the students,” the release said.
source
