For millions of students in India preparing for board and competitive exams, assessment remains a rigid affair. Tests are typically designed to cover the entire syllabus in one sweep, regardless of where the learner actually stands. For a student still wrestling with trigonometry, this means staring blankly at half the paper. For someone who has already mastered the topic, it means wading through repetitive questions with little challenge.
In this landscape, adaptive testing where the questions evolve to match a learner’s current knowledge is rare outside of private tutoring. A skilled home tutor can tweak a quiz on the spot, focusing on yesterday’s mistakes or an overlooked concept in last week’s chapter. They can adjust the pace, slow down to reinforce fundamentals, or push forward for a student ready for advanced material.
The trouble is, this kind of attention is scarce. Personal tutors are expensive and unevenly distributed, with access often limited to urban families who can afford them. Even then, sessions are typically few per week, leaving large gaps between feedback and practice.
The Scale Problem in Indian EdTech
As online learning has expanded, much of the industry has opted for scale over intimacy. The dominant format is the large livestream hundreds or even thousands of students tuning in to the same session, their microphones muted, their questions buried in chat boxes.
These classes move at a single fixed speed, designed to serve the “average” student. For slower learners, missing an early concept can create a cascading disadvantage. Faster learners, meanwhile, often disengage, waiting for the class to catch up. Both groups lose out on the targeted interaction that helps knowledge stick.
Why Learning Together Matters
Research in education points to the value of “learning by doing” engaging with material through problem-solving rather than passive listening. One of the most effective forms is co-solving: student and tutor working side by side on the same question, step by step, with corrections and clarifications happening in real time.
In traditional tutoring, this often means both leaning over the same notebook or sharing the same blackboard. Online, it can be recreated through shared whiteboards, where each step of the solution is visible and open to discussion.
Some AI-based systems are beginning to adopt this method, adjusting their approach based on the pace and accuracy of the student’s responses. A learner who hesitates over each line might get more detailed prompts; one who races ahead might get an extra challenge.
Rethinking Tests: From One-Off Events to Ongoing Feedback
An emerging innovation is the combination of adaptive testing with spaced learning revisiting material at strategic intervals to reinforce retention. Instead of waiting for the syllabus to conclude, the system serves smaller, focused tests that respond to a student’s current weaknesses.
If a particular kind of geometry problem trips up the learner today, a similar but slightly varied question might reappear later in the week. Conversely, if a topic is clearly understood, the system won’t waste time repeating it unnecessarily.
Indian AI Personal Tutor platforms like EDZA AI have begun to put this into practice, using stored session data to design these adaptive tests. A history student struggling with cause-and-effect sequencing in long-form answers might be given a targeted writing drill the next day. A physics student with recurring unit conversion errors might see extra numerical problems before moving to the next chapter. EDZA AI, on 15 August 2025, expands its personal-attention-based tutoring model to include senior secondary board and competitive exam prep.
Private-Tutor Precision Without the Price Tag
The real promise of these AI tutors is not just their ability to adapt, but their potential to make personalisation affordable and available at scale. Where a human tutor’s time is limited and costly, AI systems can extend the same style of one-on-one guidance to thousands of learners at once, without restricting sessions or increasing costs per hour.
This doesn’t eliminate the role of human teachers especially in building motivation and accountability but it could bridge a gap for the majority of students who cannot access a dedicated tutor regularly.
The Road Ahead for Indian Education
The question for Indian EdTech is no longer simply how to connect more students to online lessons. It is whether these lessons can be as responsive as a conversation with a tutor who knows the learner’s strengths, weaknesses, and preferred pace.
If adaptive, interactive systems can deliver this kind of individualised attention widely, they may finally address the long-standing shortcomings of both mass lectures and static tests. For students, it could mean something rare in the current system: learning that moves with them, instead of forcing them to catch up or slow down.
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Why Personalised Learning Still Feels Out of Reach for Most Indian Students?
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