NTA to issue bilingual question papers for regional students

With the National Testing Agency (NTA) taking over, the upcoming NEET examination (NEET 2019) – registrations for which is set to close on November 30, 2018 – looks more promising and streamlined. Students are being allowed to opt for question sheets in any of the 11 languages listed by NTA in its information bulletin. To avoid any confusion, NTA will also issue English question papers to students opting for regional language.

NEET 2018 proved to be difficult for many students as there were 49 translation errors out of 180 questions in the Tamil NEET question paper. This led to a lot of issues and delays. This year, NTA has a sound plan in place. It states that candidates opting for English would be provided test booklet in English only, however, candidates opting for Hindi or any other regional language would be provided bilingual test booklet in English and Hindi/Opted regional language. The 11 languages in which candidates can opt for question sheets are – English, Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada. Marathi, Odia, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

“This comes as a welcome move as last year I had opted for Tamil language question sheet. But due to various discrepancies in the question paper I could not get 50 percentile that was the NEET qualifying eligibility criteria. It is good that English question sheet will also be issued to students this year so that there is no room for confusion,” said Raghavendra KS, an MBBS aspirant.

NTA has clarified that in case of any ambiguity in translation of any of the questions, its English version shall be treated as final.

“Last year there were approximately 13 lakh students who had enrolled for NEET 2018. The number will spike this year because NEET has been made mandatory for overseas MBBS students as well. Around 10,000 students go abroad for MBBS every year. It is important that there are no lapses in 2019 NEET examination and admissions to Indian and overseas medical universities happen smoothly without any delays,” says Saju Bhaskar, president of Caribbean based Texila American University, an MCI recognised medical university.