A deep dive into what went wrong with entrance exams like NEET this year and how it affected the ambitions of millions of students
A protest by students’ organisations in Hyderabad, Jun. 18; (Photo: ANI)
There seems to be no end to the troubles at the National Testing Agency (NTA), which conducts major entrance examinations in the country and holds the fate of millions of students in its hands. Over three million have been left hanging with the controversies surrounding two big examinations—the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (Undergraduate) or NEET-UG, the gateway for admissions to medical courses in India, and the University Grants Commission-National Eligibility Test (UGC-NET), the key qualification for those hoping to find teaching jobs in colleges or to get junior research fellowships. While the NEET exercise is facing allegations of inflated marking and paper leaks since results were announced on June 4, the UGC-NET exam, taken by 900,000 candidates across 317 cities on June 19, was cancelled the same night after the Union ministry of education (MoE) received inputs from the home affairs ministry (MoH) about the ‘integrity of the examination being compromised’. The investigation into the UGC-NET fiasco will now be handed over to the CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation), while it is the various state authorities that are still handling the probe into the alleged NEET paper leaks.
The political ramifications of the mess are still unravelling. Union home minister Amit Shah was in a huddle with his counterparts in the education and health ministries, Dharmendra Pradhan and J.P. Nadda respectively, as well as officials from the Prime Minister’s Office to decide the next course of action. The Opposition, meanwhile, has called for a nationwide protest on June 21.
For students, the rising uncertainty and loss of faith in the system has been heartbreaking. Suni Sharma from Delhi has wanted to be a doctor for as long as she can remember. So strong was her conviction that her security guard-nurse parents sold their wedding jewellery and pooled in some of their retirement savings to send her to a coaching institute in Kota so that she could crack the NEET. The 17-year-old says she studied 10-15 hours a day for two years, took some 40 mock exams to prepare for the test held on May 5 this year. But when the results came out on June 4, she was shocked. Despite scoring 550 marks out of 720, her rank was in the 100,000-plus range, nowhere near enough for her to get into a decent medical college. “I haven’t been able to sleep or eat in the past two weeks,” says Suni, now one of thousands of students protesting the NEET results in the capital. “Nobody will be able to understand how much hard work goes into scoring these marks…and then to not get a seat because of corruption.” A score of 550 would have got Suni a rank between 40,000 and 46,000 last year, enough to get her an MBBS seat in a good college.
This year, 2.4 million students across 4,750 centres in 571 cities took the test, some 400,000 more than in 2023. An unprecedented number—67 students— scored full marks, 720, compared to just two students last year and none in 2022. Six of these perfect scorers have seat numbers in the same sequence and come from a particular exam centre in Bahadurgarh, Haryana. Incidentally, the centre, run by the wife of the local BJP youth wing chief, was plagued by issues on test day itself, including a mix-up with question papers that led to delays.
On social media, parents began sharing scorecards of students with 718 and 719 marks, an implausible total given that a correct answer is worth four marks and every wrong one docks a mark from your score. The results raised suspicions of awarding of grace marks—which 1,563 students managed (including those at the Bahadurgarh centre). Though it is still not clear how many marks were awarded, they now stand cancelled. The affected students can opt for a re-test on June 23, although experts believe the re-test is hardly likely to affect the final rankings.
The current fracas has rekindled memories of the first all-India NEET exam in 2016, where students were allowed to give a re-examination. Dr Raghav Kumar from Delhi, who completed his MBBS in 2021 from the University College of Medical Sciences in the capital, was one such aspirant that year. He says, “I opted to stick with my score in the first NEET exam instead of taking the retest. But I still remember the toll it took on my mental health…it was a gamble with my future.” Kumar adds that his score of 562 (rank 1,048 in 2016) wouldn’t even have got him a rank of 100,000 this year.
Several petitions have been submitted to the high courts and the Supreme Court citing the arbitrary grace marks, the peculiar jump in the number of high scorers and even the possibility of paper leaks. As Alakh Pandey, petitioner and CEO of PhysicsWallah, asks, “The question is, what if there are other discrepancies we are unaware of?” On June 11, Pandey had moved the SC against the arbitrary award of grace marks, saying the NTA’s explanation does not hold. The petition had the signatures of 20,000 students and included evidence that 70-80 marks had been randomly awarded to some candidates. In parallel, the possibility of a paper leak began gathering force.
THE PAPER LEAK TRAIL
Many began questioning why students from Haryana, Bihar, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Karnataka appeared for NEET at an obscure centre in Gujarat’s Godhra. Blowing the lid off a multi-crore cheating scam, the Gujarat police have now unearthed details of how at least 26 students from across the country paid Rs 10 lakh to Rs 66 lakh each to clear the NEET exam. The scam ran at three ends—one allegation involved a Vadodara-based coaching class Roy Overseas run by Parshuram Roy; the principal of Jay Jalaram school in Godhra (the exam centre), Purshottam Sharma; and a teacher at the school and designated deputy superintendent for the centre, Tushar Bhatt. The students accused of cheating were to fill in the answers they knew; the teachers would fill in the blanks after the answer key was released. But here too, after the initial investigations and an FIR being filed on May 9, no further revelations were made in the case till the Supreme Court clubbed an appeal seeking a CBI inquiry into the Godhra paper leak case with other NEET-related petitions from across the country. That’s when five of the accused were arrested on June 13.
A similar racket has come to light in Patna, Bihar. A search of junior engineer Sikandar Yadav’s vehicle on May 5 in the city yielded copies of four NEET admit cards and other documents. The 56-year-old employee of the Danapur Nagar Parishad confessed he had received the NEET questions before the exam and named four accomplices—Sanjeev Singh, Rocky, Nitish and Amit Anand. Based on their confessions, investigators discovered that the gang members had rented rooms in a boys’ hostel and a school in Patna, where some 40 students memorised the answers a day before the NEET exam. The police raided the location and recovered burnt question papers, along with admit cards, post-dated cheques worth Rs 2.3 crore and educational certificates of the students which the gang had confiscated as surety. Sources say each candidate was asked to pay Rs 30-50 lakh. The gang took advance payments of Rs 1 lakh from the students. Upon receiving the paper, the students were taken to a safe house at night to memorise the answers. So far, the police have arrested 13 people, including four candidates who took the NEET test. Thirty-five other students have been called in for questioning.
THE PROBE AND OTHER DISCREPANCIES
The NTA had constituted a panel of three experts to look into the cases reported, including impersonation, cheating and tampering with the OMR (optical mark recognition) sheet, says director-general Subodh Kumar Singh. The inquiry apparently found that 63 students used unfair means and they have since been debarred or their scores withheld. However, the DG also told agencies that “the sanctity of the medical entrance exam has not been compromised…there has been no paper leak”. The petitioners, though, are unconvinced and say they want a CBI investigation. “How do we know there aren’t more cases like Godhra and Patna?” asks Rohit Advani (name changed), a 17-year-old from Mumbai who went through the Kota grind and appeared for NEET this year (his rank was above 150,000).
There have been other peculiarities this year. For example, the original last date of registration for NEET was March 9, but was extended till 16th. Then, for the first time, a two-day window (April 9-10) was opened for more candidates to register (around 24,000 did so). There has been no explanation for why three rounds of registration were carried out. The decision to announce the results on June 4, 10 days ahead of the original date and on the day of the election results, also raised a few eyebrows. “We’ll do everything to ensure that the sanctity of the institution is maintained,” says NTA chairman Prof. Pradeep Kumar Joshi, who is also heading the four-member panel constituted by the Union government to probe the irregularities. “The matter is in court and we are ready to face any inquiry.” The fact that the investigation will be led by the very person who heads the NTA has also come in for flak. Members of the agency and the petitioners declined to comment, saying the matter is sub judice.
A shroud of mystery also surrounds those who set the papers for NEET. There are allegations of a connection between the exam setters and the coaching centres. “Entrance exam coaching in India is a multi-million dollar industry. The more toppers a centre produces, the higher the fees it can charge new students, so there is intense competition. With the new rules that centres cannot have students below 16, the pressure this year has been greater. There is certainly interaction between members of the NTA and us…many of its members are also heads of other universities. The opportunity and motive for manipulation is there, but whether it happened or not is difficult to prove,” says a source at a top coaching academy in Delhi-NCR.
WHAT IS THE WAY OUT?
Dharmendra Pradhan, the Union minister for education, has already talked about reforming the NTA. The Justice A.K. Rajan Committee, constituted by Tamil Nadu in 2021, had given some drastic suggestions. One recommendation was that the state use legal provisions to scrap NEET for medical entrance exams. Instead, it wants the higher secondary exam scores to become the sole admission criteria.
Many experts say India can learn from other countries like the US, which has standardised tests—SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test) and ACT (American College Test)—for college-bound students. Some 2 million students take these every year. “The US model is suitable for India as it offers flexibility and reduces the stress with multiple test dates throughout the year,” says Prof. Ramgopal Rao, vice-chancellor of BITS Pilani. He adds that the NTA’s transparency issues can be resolved if it is given constitutional status like the UPSC (Union Public Service Commission).
Other experts point to strengthening our medical education infrastructure so that exams aren’t so competitive in the first place. There are currently 706 medical colleges in India, 386 of them government, offering 109,170 seats for MBBS, 15 per cent of the seats in government medical colleges are reserved for the All-India Quota, the rest for the home states. One suggestion is to increase the number of seats by converting district hospitals into medical colleges using the PPP model. Medical education can also be made more affordable, particularly in private colleges, to ease the competition for government college seats. The National Medical Commission (NMC) Act has the provision to regulate fees and all other charges in 50 per cent of the seats in private medical colleges and deemed universities and is framing guidelines in this regard. “Let us be honest, this country needs more doctors,” says a professor of medicine at AIIMS Delhi, who did not wish to be named. “Most of us are massively overworked, seeing 30-35 patients a day, which is not good at all. We need to figure out a system to produce more doctors, and quality ones at that. We have seen a huge drop in the quality of students coming to study medicine. Most of them have just tired themselves out memorising useless things and either drop out within a year or perform poorly.”
Last year, medical malpractice suits in India hit the 5.2 million cases mark with incidents rising by 110 per cent and litigation by 400 per cent. Experts say this also raises doubts on whether NEET is bringing the best minds to medicine.
Regarding malpractices, many say the exam should be shifted to online mode. “NEET should be conducted online. This will solve so many issues. The exam should also be conducted in two stages, like JEE and JEE Mains, so that students have the option to retake the test in six months and not wait a whole year,” says Anil Nagar, founder of vernacular test prep platform, Adda247.
Others question the very quality of NEET, asserting that it has gone down over the years, becoming highly repetitive. Rao says entrance exams should have a large question bank with varying difficulty levels, randomly picked by an algorithm for each candidate. “This, along with real-time adaptation and immediate provision of raw scores after the test, could effectively address the challenges of scaling up exams,” he says.
Students also say that there is too much emphasis on rote learning. “I understand that Biology needs to be mugged up, but that shouldn’t be the case with Physics and Chemistry. There should be application-based questions, not just theoretical,” says Ankur Mukherjee, 19. Ankur got lucky in his second NEET attempt in 2023. With a score of 677 and an all-India rank of 1,847, he got into Vardhman Mahavir Medical College (VMMC) in the capital. When his first attempt in 2022 didn’t go as planned—he scored 583—he decided to retake the test and took a gap year. Ashutosh Mehta, 18, from Mumbai hasn’t been as lucky. He retook the exam this year and his rank has dropped by 60,000. “Last year, I could have got into a few public colleges, but they were not the best ones. This year, I can’t get through any,” he laments. He’s given up on his dreams and is joining his father’s export business.
While minister Pradhan has promised strong action against the NTA officials if guilty, it is of little consolation for the students. The stress of preparing for the exam was bad enough, having it cancelled or forced to take a retest could be the end of the dream altogether.
—With Shelly Anand, Jumana Shah, Amitabh Srivastava and Rahul Noronha
