The National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) – Undergraduate — is the largest admission examination involving an enormous amount of money that candidates undergo. This involves seeking a medical seat for coaching, admission counselling, and admission fees. Even before its inception, NEET faced litigation and challenges from powerful lobbies supporting and opposing it, including state governments, indicating its colossal impact on society and the wealth involved.
Recent controversies surrounding NEET (UG) include inflated scores and ranks, a lack of correlation between NEET and Class 12 scores, questions about the tie-breaking rule, a physics question with two correct answers, the awarding of grace marks for time loss (scrapped by the time of writing this article), and the early announcement of results, among others.
The pivotal issue in the NEET 2024 controversy is the inflation of scores and ranks, which has resulted in a top-heavy distribution instead of the desired long-tail distribution for a large competitive examination. Sixty-one candidates (originally 67, before scrapping the award marks) got the top rank with 100 per cent marks. This is more than the number of seats in AIIMS, New Delhi, India’s most sought-after medical institute. Additionally, about 22,000 candidates got above 90 per cent and 80,000 students above 83 per cent: This is equal to the seats in government medical colleges in India.
Historically, all MCQ-based competitive admission exams, such as NEET (and its original form AIPMT), JEE (Main), etc, were conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). From 2019 onwards, they were taken over by the National Testing Agency (NTA) as a nodal, premier, specialist, autonomous, and self-sustained testing organisation to conduct entrance examinations for admission/fellowship in higher educational institutions (HEIs).
The NTA was instituted with a clear differentiation from the CBSE in scoring and ranking. The latter’s objective is to assign distinct grades for a group of candidates without caring for individual ranks. On the contrary, NTA’s objective is to rank the candidates to facilitate counselling and assign preferred seats based on rank. For this, CBSE relies on short-tailed distribution, and NTA should follow the long-tailed distribution. A longer tail means a better distribution of scores, which in turn leads to clever individual ranking, which was missing in the NEET 2024. It raises the critical question: Why was NEET 2024 unable to get a precise long-tailed distribution?
The rest of the NEET 2024 issues are actually not uncommon in most large-scale examinations. For example, many students who achieve high marks in Class 12 exams do not get top ranks in competitive exams, and vice versa. This is an open issue that needs to be addressed.
Other issues may even have trivial solutions. For example, a question with two correct options can be handled with existing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) or processes. Previously, more complex ambiguities have been resolved through such processes.
For tie-breaking, NEET has a predefined hierarchy of rules based on ordering subjects and correct and incorrect answers. This subject-based hierarchy is effective except for rare scenarios like when multiple students get 100 per cent marks. This is what happened in NEET 2024. Even in this situation, there is a non-subject tie-breaking rule based on age, application number, or random generator. These rules are sufficient to resolve ties in every situation. This is not a big issue either.
Regarding the issue of grace marks awarded for time loss, the Supreme Court’s judgment (2018) for the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) prescribed the procedure for awarding grace marks in such situations. The NTA followed the process initially in NEET 2024 but later recommended scrapping the award marks in favour of a re-test for the affected candidates. The Supreme Court has found the NTA’s recommendations “fair, reasonable, and justified” and scrapped the awarded grace marks.
Finally, an early announcement of the result is always welcome. However, the final result should be made public after in-house testing and passing in-built checks and balances using contemporary technology.
But every coin has two sides. Despite the above, NTA should be complemented for disclosing most information and SoPs and making quick corrections. Notably, NTA scrapped the grace-mark awards, finding them not serving the purpose of NEET.
In contrast, the author of this article endured a decade-long (2006-2015) protracted legal battle in the apex court and high courts to ensure transparency and develop well-defined rational SoPs for admissions to the prestigious IITs. Most examinations, including NEET, use those SOPs quoting from a Supreme Court judgment (2011), “In fact the action taken by the appellants in challenging the procedure for JEE 2006, their attempts to bring in transparency in the procedure by various RTI applications, and the debate generated by the several views of experts during the course of the writ proceedings, have helped in making the merit ranking process more transparent and accurate.” The NTA was also established through the author’s proposal.
The main stakeholders of NEET 2024 are the 23 lakh aspirants and the organiser, NTA. Interestingly, the secondary stakeholders are business leaders running the trillion-rupee industry for coaching and admission counselling. Both aspirants and business leaders have been protesting due to unusual patterns of scores and ranks in NEET 2024; ultimately, this phenomenon has shaken the faith of lakhs of aspirants. Also, the coaching and counselling industry has seemingly failed to accurately predict rankings and recommend appropriate medical colleges to their clients. In any case, this has led to several litigations and media coverage.
In 2010, the Supreme Court dismissed a public interest litigation challenging IITs admissions “The petitioner’s position in relation to the examination conducted by… is nothing more than that of a busy body bystander and meddlesome interloper, who has moved the Court for gaining publicity.”
For NEET 2024, there are still allegations vis-à-viz unaddressed issues, such as paper leaks, cooperative copying at some centres, distantly located candidates for specific centres, nexus of exam and coaching centres, etc. These are the issues for investigating agencies.
To avoid the current situation from recurring, what is needed is a constantly upgraded, robust, and resilient system to counter apparent irregularities, ensuring that the integrity of examination and admission merit remains sacrosanct. To quote from a Supreme Court Judgement (2011), “All that can be said is that the selection process requires to be upgraded and fine-tuned year after year with periodic changes in the process, so that the selection process and examination remain relevant and meaningful.”
The writer is a former Computer Science professor at IIT Kharagpur, IIT Kanpur, BITS Pilani, and JNU. He was involved l in bringing transparency and reforms to competitive admission examinations
