If you're a humanities or social sciences student who's ever sat CUET and felt like ticking one of four boxes couldn't possibly capture what you actually know — a parliamentary committee just said, officially, that you might be right.
What Actually Happened
A parliamentary committee has flagged serious concerns over the Common University Entrance Test (CUET), stating that its multiple-choice question (MCQ) format may not suit humanities and social sciences students, and calling for a review of the exam's design and question quality in line with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 (Free Press Journal; The Daily Jagran). The specific body behind this isn't a random voice — it's the department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports, chaired by Rajya Sabha MP Digvijaya Singh (Free Press Journal; Times Now).
For anyone unfamiliar with how India's parliamentary system works: a Parliamentary Standing Committee is a group of Members of Parliament from the Rajya Sabha (the upper house) and Lok Sabha (the lower house) who examine specific policy areas — in this case, education — in detail and submit formal reports and recommendations back to Parliament. This particular report was submitted to Rajya Sabha Chairman C P Radhakrishnan (Free Press Journal).
The Committee's Core Argument
The committee's language on the format problem was blunt: "Multiple-choice question (MCQ) answers are particularly ill-suited for humanities and social sciences disciplines which are definitionally centred on independent, subjective thinking" (Free Press Journal; Times Now). In plain terms: subjects like history, literature, sociology, or political science are built around forming and defending your own interpretation — not selecting the one "correct" answer out of four options. A tick-box format, the committee argues, structurally can't capture that kind of thinking the way an essay or long-form response can.
Their recommendation followed directly from that critique: "The Committee recommends review of the quality of question paper and also design of the CUET exam to ensure that it meets the purpose envisaged in NEP, 2020" (Free Press Journal; The Daily Jagran).
Why CUET Exists in the First Place — and Where the Committee Sees It Falling Short
To understand why this criticism lands the way it does, it helps to remember what CUET was built to solve. The committee itself noted that CUET was introduced starting the 2022-23 academic year specifically "to reduce the burden on students, universities, and the entire education system, and to bring candidates passing out from different boards on an equal footing" (Free Press Journal). Before CUET, a student's admission chances could hinge heavily on which board they graduated from, since grading standards and difficulty varied widely across state and national boards — CUET was meant to level that playing field with one standardized test.
That said, the committee isn't dismissing CUET wholesale. It explicitly acknowledged CUET's merits as a single entrance exam (Free Press Journal; Times Now) — including that it provides a single application window, letting students apply once and sit one exam for admission to multiple universities, rather than filing separate applications everywhere (Free Press Journal). But some committee members aren't convinced CUET works well as a truly universal admissions method for all undergraduate programs (Free Press Journal; Times Now).
The committee's clearest example of that mismatch: Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). It observed that treating CUET as the sole entrance exam doesn't allow universities like JNU — which operate under their own specific legislative mandates — to meet their particular admissions needs (Free Press Journal; Times Now). JNU has long been known for its distinctive, discussion-heavy approach to humanities and social sciences — exactly the kind of program the committee argues an MCQ-only gate doesn't serve well.
The Scale of What's at Stake
This isn't a small, niche exam the committee is critiquing — CUET has grown into the second-largest examination in India within just two years, drawing 13,54,699 applicants in 2025 (The Daily Jagran). To its credit, CUET(UG) has already been adjusted based on experience from its first three editions — its structure has been rationalised, the 2025 edition offered 37 subjects, and results in 2025 were declared more than three weeks earlier than in 2024 (The Daily Jagran). So the exam has been iterating — the committee's report is essentially saying that iteration needs to go further, specifically on question design for non-STEM disciplines.
The committee also flagged a separate, related concern: recurring exam-related irregularities despite government efforts to fix them, and it's pushing the Ministry of Education to present a time-bound blueprint for implementing reforms recommended by a separate high-level panel (Times Now).
What This Means If You're a CUET Aspirant
If you're heading into CUET for a humanities or social science program, this report doesn't change anything about your exam this cycle — CUET's format stays MCQ-based for now. What it does signal is that the format itself is under active, official scrutiny at the parliamentary level, not just informal student complaints on social media. If reforms do follow — whether that's a shift toward more subjective response types for humanities papers, or other design changes to "meet the purpose envisaged in NEP 2020" — they're more likely to show up in future CUET cycles than this one. For now, the practical reality remains the same: prepare for the MCQ format as it exists, while knowing that the loudest institutional voice questioning whether that format actually serves your discipline just came from Parliament itself.