Most exam disasters don’t happen during evaluation — they happen weeks before, quietly, while nobody is watching. A repeated question slips into two consecutive papers. A difficulty level is skewed because the same three faculty members always set the toughest sections. A paper leaks because it sat in someone’s inbox for a week before printing....

There’s a particular kind of chaos that happens every exam season: examiners hunched over towering stacks of answer booklets, red pens running dry, and a coordinator somewhere frantically trying to track which bundle went to which evaluator. It’s a system that has run universities for decades — and it’s also a system that’s quietly breaking...