About ExamDB

The idea

Every field has its reference. Films have IMDb. Knowledge has Wikipedia. Competitive examinations - which decide what tens of millions of people do with their lives - have nothing. The information exists, but it is scattered across a few hundred government portals, published as scanned PDFs and unlinked notice pages, and mirrored by ad-choked aggregators that get it wrong.

ExamDB is an attempt at the missing reference: one clean, permanently free database of exams - what they are, who conducts them, who can sit them, and exactly when. Not a coaching site, not a lead-generation funnel, not a content farm. A database.

It is a database first and a countdown second. A cycle that has already finished is not a gap in the record, it is the record: when the notification came out, when applications opened and closed, when the exam was held, when results landed. Those facts stay true forever, and the official portal usually deletes them the day the next cycle opens.

The catalogue starts with exams conducted in India, because that is where the coverage is deepest today. That is a starting point, not a definition. Nothing in the data model is limited to one country.

Built to run without a person watching

The hard part of a project like this is not building it. It is that it stays correct on a Tuesday in March when nobody is looking. Exam sites redesign, dates shift, cycles conclude, and most directories quietly rot into a list of last year's deadlines.

So ExamDB is designed to be unattended by default. Roughly thirty scrapers run on a schedule and pull directly from the source. Every date carries a confidence rating derived from where it came from. When two sources disagree, the conflict is flagged rather than silently resolved. When a scraper suddenly returns nothing, that fires an alert, because a source going quiet is usually a site redesign, not a calm month. When a date moves, the change is recorded, so you can see not just today's date but the fact that it slipped.

The catalogue itself - which exams exist, what they are called, how they are grouped - is curated by hand, because that part genuinely needs judgement. The dates are automated, because that part needs to happen every day forever.

Where the data comes from

Official sources are the ground truth. Scrapers pull from UPSC, SSC, NTA, IBPS, SBI, RBI, Indian Railways, GATE, JEE Advanced, and the state public service commissions and state CET authorities, plus the individual bodies behind entrance exams like BITSAT, COMEDK, VITEEE, NATA, IIT JAM, NEST, MAT and NORCET.

Where an official body has not yet published a date - which is common, sometimes for months - education news sources are used as a provisional second layer. Those dates are labelled with lower confidence and are replaced the moment the official source speaks.

The catalogue currently covers close to 200 exams, and the aim is not a curated selection of popular ones. It is all of them.

How you can help - and how you can't

ExamDB is not publicly editable. There is no wiki button, no submissions queue, no crowd. That is a deliberate choice: an exam date is a fact a person will make an irreversible decision on, and an open edit surface on that is a liability, not a feature.

What genuinely helps is telling us when something is wrong or missing. A wrong date, an exam that should be here and isn't, a body whose site changed - those reports are the highest-value thing you can send, and they get acted on.

Accounts

Everything on ExamDB is readable without signing in, and always will be. An account is optional and does exactly one thing: it lets you save exams and sort them into lists, so the handful you actually care about are one click away instead of one search away. No email is ever sent to you that you did not ask for. See the Privacy Policy for exactly what is stored.

Important disclaimer

ExamDB is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any government body, examination authority, board, or educational institution. Data is gathered from public sources and may be inaccurate, incomplete, or out of date.

Always confirm exam dates and deadlines against the official notification before acting on them. ExamDB is a reference, not an authority. Full terms are on the Terms page.

How it's built

Python and FastAPI on the backend, Next.js on the frontend, PostgreSQL for storage, and scheduled GitHub Actions for the scrapers - no always-on worker fleet, which is part of how a project like this stays free to run. Open source.

Who made this

ExamDB is built and run by Pranjal Bhatnagar, solo, from India.

Found an error? Missing an exam? Have feedback? psbhatnagar.in@gmail.com