The NEET problem

It is time to review the national exam format

The suicide by a 17-year-old student from Tamil Nadu, Anitha, who aspired to become a doctor, must necessitate a rethink on how India chooses candidates for undergraduate medical courses such as MBBS and BDS. Last week, Anitha took her life after the Supreme Court ruled against her petition to not use the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) scores for deciding admissions. She had scored very poorly in the NEET, which is a country-wide exam conducted by the Delhi-based Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). However, she had performed very well in her state board exam and would have easily secured admission had she been judged on that instead of the NEET. 

Supporters of the NEET say it makes ample sense. For a long while there was no uniform criteria to judge students across the country in terms of eligibility for medical courses. There was a growing clamour that medical seats were decided not on the basis of merit but by capitation fee. So in 2010, the Medical Council of India, which regulates medical education and qualifications in the country, amended norms to streamline the admission mechanism by replacing all existing processes by the NEET. However, not every state accepted the use of this exam. In particular, Tamil Nadu tried all means, including legislative methods, to avoid the NEET but in 2016 its resistance ended after the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the NEET’s usage. 

There is no doubt that some national-level certification for school leavers may be unavoidable — the US has its SAT and equivalent systems, and all British schools have the same A-level tests — as many state exams have lost credibility because of excessive grace marks and inter-state competition to give better marks to their own students. The engineering exam system seems to have worked alright, but has ended up devaluing school board results and has led to multiplication of Kota-style cram shops. The same can be said about the NEET as well. Besides, the central argument against the NEET is that it is based on the CBSE’s syllabus and discriminates against students from state boards. There is also an elite bias as well as a language bias. Earlier in the year, there was much hue and cry, which even resulted in the apex court holding back the announcement of the NEET results, after students in different states, including Tamil Nadu, complained that the level of questions in the English version of the exam paper was easier than in the vernacular versions. 

What all these factors illustrate is that the NEET, which started off with the noble intention of rewarding merit and creating a level-playing field for all students, has in fact become a vehicle wherein merit itself is the chief casualty. There is no reason why the CBSE should be preferred over other boards. It is neither the biggest board nor is it considered the best for science education. In a country where the doctor-patient ratio is an abysmal 1:1,700 (as against the ideal norm of 1:400), letting thousands of medical colleges seats go unfilled even as meritorious students sit out makes no sense.