Exam preparation is the business of preparing students for competitive exams, in which only a small share of the students who sit them win a place. In India, the biggest are JEE, for engineering colleges such as the IITs and NITs; NEET, for medical courses such as MBBS, which more than 20 lakh students sit each year; and the exams for government jobs, such as the civil services exam held by UPSC and the bank and railway exams. Preparing students for these exams is one of India's largest education businesses, and much of it now happens on a phone.
Coaching began in classrooms. Towns such as Kota, in Rajasthan, grew around coaching institutes, and students moved there for one or two years. Online coaching made the same course far cheaper, because one teacher can teach lakhs of students at once in a live online class. Today the business is a mix. Online companies have opened physical centres, and classroom institutes have built online arms.
Here is a typical journey. You are in Class 11 in Patna, and you want to study at an IIT. You first watch free lectures on a coaching company's video channel. This is the freemium model: the lectures are free, and the full course is paid. You then buy a two-year JEE batch on an online coaching platform, and pay the fee by UPI in the app through a payment gateway.
Every day, you attend live classes and solve practice questions. When you are stuck late at night, you photograph the problem, and AI doubt solving explains it in Hindi or English. AI answers can be confidently wrong. This is called AI hallucination, so a teacher checks the answers that students report as wrong. For organic chemistry, which you find hardest, you also book a few one-to-one sessions on an online tutoring marketplace.
Every few weeks, you sit an online mock test, a full practice exam under exam conditions. Your score is ranked against every student who took the same test, so you know roughly where you would stand in the real JEE. The app then gives you more questions from your weakest chapters. Choosing practice from a learner's last answers is called adaptive learning.
Years later, after your BTech, you decide to apply for a master's degree in the United States. You need a GRE score. Test prep for GRE, GMAT and licensing exams prepares students for this and other exams set abroad. It also covers the licensing exams that doctors, nurses and accountants must pass before they may practise. You sit the GRE at a test centre in your city. The test is run by an exam delivery platform, which checks your identity, supervises the test and reports your score.