– Dr. Krishna Kumar is honorary professor of education, Panjab University, and a former Director of NCERT The 200 questions that NEET-UG asks candidates to solve are multiple choice questions. Students drilled into speedy cracking of questions are certain to get high rank. What have these skills to do with becoming a good doctor? This summer’s awful story of NEET (National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test – the centralised national exam for undergrad admission into the country’s 706 medical colleges, written by 2.4 million school-leavers in 2024) reveals how far things have gone in a wrong direction. But the NEET story is merely a symptom of what has happened to our system of education. If you start from June 4 when NEET-UG results were declared, you can recognize all efforts made by the authorities and institutions to ignore grave lapses. When it became impossible to ignore protests, attempts were made to use adhesive tape to make things look normal. The images of 18-year-olds protesting in New Delhi’s sweltering heat will not endure in the ever-changing world of the new digital media, but the troubles afflicted by NEET will. Can the expert committee appointed to look into them provide applicable solutions? Can the National Testing Agency (NTA) which conducts NEET and other entrance tests learn from the experience and improve itself? These questions are not real, in the sense that they don’t reveal how deep the rot has penetrated. Even if NEET had delivered a result without convulsions, we would still be unsure if the successful candidates are better suited to pursue the medical practitioner’s career than those who did not succeed. The 200 questions NEET-UG asks candidates to solve at furious speed are like ones asked in any Multiple Choice Question (MCQ)-based exam. They are all drawn from the NCERT’s senior secondary level textbooks for three science subjects. If you ‘master’ (meaning, memorise) these textbooks, and if you’ve been drilled into speedy cracking of question items, you are certain to get a high rank. What have these skills to do with becoming a good doctor? Will these skills help a medical practitioner maintain her devotion to the profession throughout a long career? Not really. All that NEET does is to offer a process to eliminate a vast number of candidates and arrange the rest into a ranked order. It is no secret that success in NEET depends on being professionally coached. The legal battle for and against re-doing NEET is led by coaching institutions. In televised debates one saw several famous coaches of the different science subjects, but not one teacher from a regular higher secondary school. NEET and other competitive exams have pushed science school teachers to the margins. Schools have no choice but to allow students to attend coaching classes in school time, and NEET candidates seldom worry about (the school-leaving) board exam results. A few years ago, the IIT admission test allotted a certain percentage of marks to students’ board exam performance. Later, this arrangement was cancelled. By usurping the…
