Are MCQ-based Humanities entrance exams testing the right skills?

Who was the ruler who called himself “devaputra”, or “son of god”?

This is a question that can make a student preparing for a Humanities entrance examination stop and search their memory. This question appeared in the Common University Entrance Test-UG (CUET-UG) History paper in 2025. The answer is a Kushana ruler.

A 2025 CUET-PG English paper asks candidates to match Bartleby, Project MUSE, WorldCat and Shodhganga with the type of research material they provide. In the UGC-NET English examination, candidates encounter questions such as: Who defined culture as “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language”? The answer is literary critic Raymond Williams.

Then there are questions based on an unfamiliar passage, where the candidate has to understand what a writer is saying or draw an inference from the text.

All of these are multiple-choice questions (MCQs). The questions mentioned above test different skills; some may require recall of a specialised historical fact; another tests familiarity with research resources; another recognises a scholar’s formulation; and a passage-based question can require interpretation.

For admissions in Humanities courses, from UG-level courses to Ph.D., exams are increasingly being conducted through MCQs. Thus, it is important to scrutinise what skills they are testing in a candidate.

To examine that question, The Hindu analysed CUET-UG History and Political Science papers from 2024 and 2025, and looked at postgraduate and UGC-NET English question papers. The aim was to examine the knowledge and skills that Humanities candidates are asked to demonstrate through MCQs.

In the 2024 CUET-UG History paper, 31 of the 50 questions analysed — 62% — were classified as factual recall. Nine (18%) tested conceptual understanding and 10 (20%) were based on two unseen passages. In the 2025 paper, 30 of the 42 questions analysed — about 71% — were classified as factual recall, while 12 were source-based and two required historical reasoning or application.

The questions were not simply about remembering dates. In 2025, 10 questions involved names or attribution, eight involved factual associations or matching pairs, six required chronology or sequencing, five concerned events or places, and only one was an explicit date-recall question.

One question, for instance, asked candidates to arrange four developments in Harappan archaeology in chronological order. Another asked what the Gandatindu Jataka describes. A third asked candidates to identify which description was associated with Al-Biruni.

For students, preparation consequently involves remembering not just individual facts but connections between them — a scholar and a work, a traveller and an observation, or events in their correct sequence.

That preparation strategy is reflected in what candidates themselves say.

Shubham Kumar, who prepared for CUET History, says, “The dates given in between the chapters are being asked directly, but the ones given in timelines are only being asked to arrange in chronological orders, not the exact date.”

Shreekanth Katika, a second-year student at Delhi University studying B.A. History (Hons.) advises students to stay close to their NCERT textbooks. “Even if you just read the pink boxes properly, you’ll be able to guess a lot of answers after looking at the options,” he says, adding that timelines, important dates and pictures should also be revised.

The pattern changes somewhat when the examination moves to a specialised subject and a higher level of study.

For UGC-NET English, candidates describe preparing for chronology, literary theory, criticism, linguistics, authors and their works, and recurring areas identified through previous-year papers.

Harsh Govind, a Ph.D. scholar at Christ University, who says that he cleared all the NET attempts he appeared for, advises candidates to have a strong grasp of the history of English literature and literary theory. “Try to learn the dates of important author’s works, they ask a lot of chronology-based questions,” he says.

Akarshit Gulati says previous-year questions helped him identify writers who appeared frequently. “I switched to the Previous-Year Questions (PYQs) and got an idea of the writers who were asked frequently. I found that there were some on repeat almost every year — Hardy, Dickens, Eliot to name a few. So these became my top priorities.”