Online coaching for competitive exams is a course for one exam, such as JEE, NEET or a government job exam, sold online to a group of students called a batch, usually for one or two years. The course has live and recorded classes, study material, practice questions, mock tests and doubt solving. It is the online form of the coaching institutes that grew up in towns such as Kota.
The batch is what coaching companies sell. Each batch is for one exam, one exam year and one stage, such as a Class 11 batch, a Class 12 batch, or a batch for droppers, the students who take a year off after school to prepare again. There are also batches for NEET PG, the exam doctors take for postgraduate places, and for law and management entrance exams.
Take, for example, a Class 12 student in Siliguri who is preparing for NEET. She buys a one-year NEET batch in the app for ₹5,000, and pays by UPI through a payment gateway. Courses that combine online classes with a physical centre cost much more. Some families pay for those with an education loan, in instalments.
Her day follows a fixed pattern. At 4 p.m., a biology teacher teaches a two-hour live online class to about 50,000 students at once. Students type questions in the chat, and the teacher answers some of them aloud. Each class is recorded, so she can watch it again later. After class, she downloads the class notes and a set of daily practice problems. On Sundays, she sits a full mock test.
The software must do three hard things. First, it must deliver video to students in small towns, on cheap phones and slow connections. So the app sends lower-quality video to slower phones. Second, it must handle sudden crowds. On the evening before a big test, many lakhs of students may open the app in the same hour. Third, it runs the two parts that students use most. Online mock tests rank each student against everyone who took the same test. AI doubt solving answers each student's questions at any hour.
How do these companies make money at such low fees? Many use freemium. Free lectures on a video channel bring in millions of students, and a small share of them buy a paid batch. Because one teacher teaches lakhs of students, each student costs little to teach.
How is it different from an online tutoring marketplace? A coaching batch teaches one fixed course to thousands of students at the same time. A tutoring marketplace matches one student with one tutor, for the topic that student needs, at a time the student chooses.