Rich youths with abysmal marks get into medical course

NEW DELHI: With no cut-off for individual subjects – physics, chemistry and biology—in the NEET entrance exam, at least 400 students with single-digit marks in physics and chemistry and 110 students with zero or negative marks in them have been admitted for MBBS in 2017, mostly in private colleges. This raises a question. If getting zero in these subjects doesn’t make a person ineligible for admission, why bother to test in that subject at all?Interestingly, the original notification to adopt a common entrance examination had stipulated that students should score at least 50% in individual subjects. However, the subsequent notification, which brought in the percentile system, dropped the stipulation on marks in individual subjects.TOI analysed the subject marks of 1,990 students who got admitted to MBBS with NEET scores of less than 150 out of 720 in 2017. We found 530 with single-digit marks, zero or less in physics or chemistry or even both.There would be many more such examples among those admitted in MBBS courses with aggregate marks above 150. Out of these 530, 507 were in private medical colleges . The average tuition fees paid by them (not including hostel, mess, library and other miscellaneous charges) were about Rs 17 lakh per annum showing how rich students with abysmal NEET marks have effectively been able to buy their way into medical colleges. NEET, promising a merit-based selection, was meant to prevent exactly this.About half of these students are in deemed universities which would be free to conduct their own final MBBS examination. Once cleared, these exams would allow their students to register and practise as doctors.NEET was first mooted in a December 2010 gazette notification of the Medical Council of India (MCI), then administered by the government appointed Board of Governors. The notification specified that eligibility for the MBBS course would be by obtaining at least 50% of marks (or 40% in the case of reserved categories) in “each paper of NEET”. However, a subsequent MCI notification in February 2012 not only changed the eligibility criteria from 50% and 40% to 50th and 40th percentile, but also did away with minimum marks in each paper. When the Supreme Court in 2016 reversed its earlier order to pave the way for NEET to be implemented, it effectively revived this notification.Dr KK Talwar who headed the BoG in 2012 explained to TOI that faced with stiff resistance to NEET from state governments, the focus then was on finding a way to get NEET accepted. “If the NEET results over the years show that the percentile cut off is too low, or that minimum marks need to be fixed, there is nothing stopping the MCI from making necessary amendments,” said Dr Talwar.Read this story in Bengali