Why are India's toughest exams so hard? UPSC, JEE, NEET, GATE, CAT and CUET are India's biggest competitive exams, but who were they actually designed for? The answer goes back 170+ years.
From the Macaulay Committee and British India to IIT-JEE, NEET, GATE, CAT and CUET, India's competitive exam system has been built to solve very different problems over the years.
The UPSC exam began as a way to select candidates for the colonial administration. IITs were created to build India's engineering workforce. NEET aimed to replace a fragmented system of medical entrance exams. GATE, CAT and CUET were created to standardise admissions and reduce the need for multiple entrance tests.
But there's a strange pattern across all of them: *the student was rarely the person the system was designed around.*
So why do India's competitive exams feel so brutal? And are students really failing these exams, or are we asking students to survive a system that was never designed for them? Chapters 00:00 Why India's Toughest Exams Feel Impossible 00:39 The History of India's Exam System 01:20 How IIT-JEE Became So Competitive 01:47 Why India Created NEET 02:14 The Story Behind GATE 02:40 How CUET Changed Admissions 02:54 What India's Toughest Exams Have in Common 03:25 Is India's Education System Failing Students? 03:40 What's Actually Wrong With Indian Education?
This video explores the history of India's most challenging competitive exams, arguing that they were not designed to filter for merit or support students, but rather to serve the administrative convenience and strategic goals of the authorities who created them.
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The big bad exams made by the big bad system are all out there to get you.
Wrong.
Everyone assumes India's toughest exams exist to filter out the weak.
You're wrong.
What I'm about to say is going to sound crazy.
The Macaulay Committee designs a merit-based exam for the top government jobs in British India.
IIT project wasn't built to keep people out.
Before NEET, over 25 different state medical exams existed.
Not one of them was built with the student in mind.
At all.
Even I can't believe what I'm about to say is a fact.
And it makes no sense.
But truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction.
So, come with me back to 1854, before independence, where this whole thing started.
UPSC 1854.
The Macaulay Committee designs a merit-based exam for the top government jobs in British India.
One problem.
It's only held in London.
Age gap 18 to 23.
Syllabus, Greek and Latin classics.
Basically, zero Indians could realistically pass it.
That wasn't an accident.
It didn't even shift to India until 1922.
Now, here's the part that's actually interesting.
Because you'd expect every one of these stories to have the same villain over and over.
It's not.
Watch this.
JE 1964.
1961, post-independence.
Pandit Nehru's IIT project wasn't built to keep people out.
It was built to manufacture engineers, fast, for a young country that barely had any.
Sounds idealistic, right?
Except it would sooner than later mutate into one of the toughest exams in the world,
with a success rate of only 1% to 1.5%.
NEET 2013.
NEET has had a messy timeline.
Before NEET, over 25 different state medical exams existed.
Students were sitting for 7 to 9 exams a year, just for a shot at a medical college.
NEET was built to fix that.
And its history is messy.
The first NEET exam took place in 2013.
It got killed by the Supreme Court in that year, before finally coming back in 2016.
GATE 1983.
Built to standardize admissions to postgraduate engineering programs at IISc
and the five main IITs.
This one's different.
It's not just a get-into-a-college exam.
It's also a get-a-job exam.
CAT 1977.
IIMs got sick of running separate entrance tests for every institute.
So they built one shared test instead.
CUET 2020.
Before CUET and forced through the NEP 2020,
every central university ran its own separate admission test.
Same fatigue as CAT and GATE.
Just the most recent coat of paint.
So look at the pattern again.
Colonial control.
Nation building at speed.
Institutional paperwork.
Five different problems.
Five different decades.
Five completely different people making the call.
And in every single one of those rooms, across 190 years,
the student sitting in the exam was never who they were solving for.
They were solving for control and convenience.
Not because anyone was out to get you.
Just because you were never the variable in the equation.
That 3 a.m. spiral before your exam?
That's not you being dramatic.
You're not failing the exam.
The system is failing you.
If you want to go deeper on how the system keeps failing students,
we made a whole video on what's actually wrong with the Indian education system.
Go watch that next.
