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Here’s how NEET should be restructured
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Students from various organisation protest over the NEET-UG and UGC-NET examinations issue outside Ministry of Education in New Delhi on June 20, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Shashi Shekhar Kashyap
On Friday (August 2), the Supreme Court put the government on a deadline to completely restructure the NEET exam process.
What should this restructuring be? Here are some key changes needed.
The NEET-UG final results data put out by the National Technical Agency shows a 3 lakh increase in test takers this year — nearly a 15% increase over last year. This is a trend, not just a one-time phenomenon.
How the NEET-UG exam can be made more student-friendly
The NTA data shows that each year from 2021, the number of students appearing for NEET has been increasing at an alarming rate. In 2021, 15.9 lakh students wrote NEET and this has now increased to 23.3 lakh in 2024. This shows a cumulative increase of 12% per year.
Although the number of Class 12 students passing out nationwide has remained more or less the same, the number of students writing NEET has been increasing year over year. This year’s increase is particularly steep. Much of this steep rise has come from Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan where the the number of students appearing for NEET has risen 25–30%.
This increase is not the result of more Class 12 students attempting NEET. The increase can be attributed to students repeating NEET multiple times. As more and more students from previous years repeat NEET along with the recent Class 12 pass-outs, the overall number increases.
Why is this trend alarming?
Repeaters who attempt the examination two-three times have an unfair advantage over recent Class 12 pass-outs. They have to focus only on NEET preparation, whereas Class 12 students have to attend school and study for board exams along with the preparation for NEET. As repeat students increase, Class 12 students are being edged out of the competition. If this trend continues, soon Class 12 pass-outs will not stand a chance and everyone will be forced to become a multi-year repeater.
Apart from this being unfair to a Class 12 student, this system is bad for the repeaters as well. Pushing lakhs of students into coaching classes where they spend two-three years getting coached for an entrance exam is clearly not the best way to utilize their most productive learning years.
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With the number of medical seats being so few, even after three years of repeating the exam, a majority of the students will not be able to secure a medical seat. The current system is encouraging students to waste precious years of their lives.
Currently, the NEET cut-off is kept so low (just 164 marks out of 720) that 13 lakh students qualify for around 1.1 lakh available medical seats. Almost 13 times the number of seats available have qualified.
This has led to a situation where a middle-class student who scores 400 marks in NEET does not get a medical seat, but a rich student who scores less than 200 marks can buy a seat in a private medical college. There is obvious pressure from private college management to keep the NEET cut-off low. However, this system is unfair to the majority of the students.
A solution to this would be to increase the cut-off for NEET significantly so that the number of qualified students is less than double the number of seats available. With 1.1 lakh seats are currently available, only the top 2.2 lakh students should be qualified.
Horizontal quota for government school students
NEET has become so competitive that even hard-working and intelligent students cannot hope to clear the exam without special coaching. And today, NEET favours repeaters who after passing out of Class 12, spend 2-3 years on attending coaching classes full-time. Only the rich and upper-middle classes can afford to do this. Students from low-income families cannot afford to spend the money, nor waste two-three years just attending coaching classes.
NEET is unfairly biased against the poor. Studies show that medical graduates from low-income families have a higher chance of serving in low-income areas. So, it is important to get more doctors from low-income families.
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A horizontal quota should be introduced for government school students (or an income-based quota similar to BPL) that can be applied within each reservation category in NEET. Tamil Nadu introduced a 7.5% horizontal quota for government school students in 2020 and this has dramatically increased the number of government school students joining medical colleges. This needs to be replicated across the country.
Some say that students could easily shift to a government school for Class 12 alone. The requirement could therefore be that students must be in government schools since Class 9 to avail this quota, just as is the rule in Tamil Nadu.
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