Vineet Joshi, former CBSE chairman has been appointed as the head of National Testing Agency for the period of five years, as stated by the order issued by the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), responsible to recruit the important position,

About Vineet Joshi:

Mr Vineet Joshi is the former chairman of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). He is a 1992-batch IAS officer of the Manipur cadre and is currently and is currently the resident commissioner of Manipur government.

During his tenure as CBSE chairman, he had introduced revolutionary yet controversial changes such as Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) and making the Class X board examination optional, to mention few. Interestingly, both these changes are struck down by the current establishment at the centre.

About National Testing Agency:

Finance MinisterMr  Arun Jaitley had during the budget session of 2017-18, announced the intent to set up NTA, as an autonomous and self-sustained premier testing organization to all major entrance examinations in the country for higher education.

Later in the month of October, NTA was approved by the Union cabinet to conduct entrance tests that are currently conduct by any central department or ministry. The first assignment for the NTA shall be in the year 2019, it will take over all entrance examinations currently being organised by the CBSE and UGC’s.

National Eligibility Test (NET), Central Teacher Eligibility Test (CTET) and National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) shall also be among them. The NTA shall have the direct impact on 40 lakh students appearing in various entrance examinations for UG and PG courses.

Most importantly, the establishment of NTA shall relieve the CBSE, AICTE and other bodies of the responsibility of conducting these entrance examinations.

NTA shall also help in achieving following goals:

• Higher reliability and transparency.
• Standardization of difficulty level for assessing the aptitude, intelligence and problem-solving abilities.
• Dedicated team to look after the overall management of exams and plug the holes which lead to cheating and paper leaks.

According to the proposed composition of the NTA.

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) will be the Director-General to be appointed by the government. There will be a Board of Governors comprising members from user institutions. The Director-General will be assisted by nine verticals headed by academicians/experts.