Hello, friends!
The results of the pre-medical exam, NEET, have caused a commotion all over the country. Although 2.3 million students took this exam this year, it is not just about these 2.3 million students. It is about every student in the country who expects a fair chance to get admission to a good college. It is about every child in the country who thinks that by studying hard, he will have a bright future.
We all know that there is a lot of pressure on students in our country. Competition is very tough. There needs to be more good colleges in the country. There needs to be more seats in good colleges. And now, the exams to allocate those seats must be appropriately conducted. If they are not conducted properly, what hope will be left for the country’s future? Paper leaks, or misconducting exams, have become quite common over the past few years.
Just a few days after the exam, Patna police arrested 13 people for leaking the exam papers. They charged each student ₹3 million to ₹ 5 million for those leaked papers. Not only that, look at this news from 10th May. An entire racket was busted in Gujarat. An education consultancy owner, a school teacher, and a BJP leader were charging students ₹1 million for help with the exam.
Paper leaks have become so common in this “New” India that the Indian Express investigation has revealed that in the last five years, there have been 41 paper leaks, that has affected the lives of 14 million job seekers. How many times have we seen protests regarding these paper leaks? There’s one going on right now, and as always, these protests would have been ignored but this time, the matter isn’t limited to paper leaks.
When the NEET results were declared on 4th June, there were some unbelievable irregularities in it. It’s being called a large-scale scam. “Is this the ‘transparency’ they talk about?” “If they were transparent, they would have come forward with the answers.” “Our hearts break when we see the students’ videos.” “They have played a dirty trick with the students from all over the country.” “Students did their best in the exam.” “Mr Narendra Modi, stop being silent.” “Son, you’ll get passing marks, right?”
Imagine, friends, what a student must go through. A 16-17 year old child studies hard day and night and spends a year preparing for this one exam. And then you hear the news of this scam. All the hard work has been wasted. So, a straightforward but essential piece of advice is that There should always be a Plan B and a Plan C in life. Don’t bet your entire future on one exam. You should have at least one backup plan.
NEET-UG’s exam is the National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test for Undergraduates. This is the undergraduate admission exam for all medical, dental, and AYUSH courses in the country. This is the only such exam in our country. Before this, there was the AIPMT test. All India Pre-Medical Test. However, in the AIPMT era, other pre-medical exams were conducted by medical colleges and states. To replace all those exams with one exam, NEET was introduced in 2013.
In the beginning, many states like Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, West Bengal, and Tamil Nadu protested against this. So it took many years. And in 2016, the first NEET exam was conducted. CBSE oversaw the NEET exams during the first three years. However, after 2019, NTA was given the responsibility of conducting these exams. NTA is the National Testing Agency. It is an autonomous agency which was established in November 2017 under the Department of Higher Education of the Ministry of Education of India.
When this agency was formed, it was hoped to retain its independence and we will get more transparency while conducting exams. People’s confidence regarding these exams will increase. But the opposite has happened. Today, people’s anger is directed towards this NTA. What is the reason behind this? Let’s dig into it in depth.
The problem started even before the exam was conducted. On 9th February, 2024, NTA opened the registration for this exam and gave it one month. The deadline to register was 9th March. Which is normal; one month was given. But on 9th March, this deadline was extended for one week. Now, this is not a big deal because some students may have been so focused on their studies that they forgot to register for the exam for this month. Okay, so they extended the deadline for another week. However, one month later, on 9th April, this registration link was reopened. From 9th April to 10th April, on the request of the “stakeholders.” And after this, once again, a correction window was granted.
From 11th April to 15th April. Which “stakeholder” requested this? After this, the exam is conducted on 5th May and even after this, there was news of multiple paper leaks from different states. Sometimes from Gujarat, sometimes from Bihar, and even from Odisha. But the real fun begins on 4th June when the results were declared. The NEET exam follows an MCQ pattern, which tests students in four subjects. Physics, Chemistry, Zoology, and Botany.
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Each subject has 50 questions, out of which 45 have to be attempted. So, out of a total of 200, One hundred eighty questions have to be attempted. Correct answers get four marks; incorrect answers get minus one mark. Students are given 3 hours and 20 minutes; the maximum possible mark is 720. Now, what happens is that 67 students score full marks. 720 out of 720. All of them get All India Rank 1.
This is very strange because in last year’s exam only two people scored perfect marks And the year before, in the 2022 NEET, only four people got AIR 1 but no one got full marks. 715 was the highest score. And the year before 2021, only three people scored perfect 720. And now, suddenly, 67 people have got the elusive perfect score. How is this possible? NTA has stated three reasons for this.
First, an NTA official said that this year’s exam was elementary, that’s why so many people could score full marks. But when students and experts were asked, before the results were declared, they had said that this year’s exam was very tough. They predicted that the average score would go down, and no one would get full marks.
Secondly, NTA said that the number of candidates was very high this year. Three hundred thousand more candidates appeared for this exam than for the 2023 exam. And because there were more candidates, “Naturally,” higher scores were seen. But the third reason is the most interesting. NTA said that there are so many AIR 1 because 50 out of the 67 toppers, were given grace marks.
Out of these 50, 44 students were given grace marks because there was some discrepancy in the answer keys. The remaining six students were given grace marks due to time-related issues. There was a physics question in this exam which had two correct answers. Because this question is in both the old and new editions of the NCERT textbook, but the two had different answers. So, subject experts said that both options should be marked as correct.
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First of all, how should a national exam be conducted? Students study 12-13 hours a day for a year, while NTA needs help getting the questions right. And secondly, what kind of an exam is this where 75% of toppers could get full marks only because Do they get grace marks? Let’s look at this in more depth. Look at this question.
In this question, you had to identify which statement is correct. The first statement is that atoms are electrically neutral as they contain an equal number of positive and negative charges. The second statement is: The atoms of each element are stable and emit their characteristic spectrum. The correct answer to this question is that ”the first statement is correct, and the second statement is wrong”. That is option number 4.
But NTA said that we should also consider option 2 to be correct because in 2018’s NCERT textbook, this statement is written there. That the atoms of all elements are stable. NTA said that it received more than 13,000 complaints about this question. But for this reason, does marking a wrong answer as correct make any sense?
After 2018, every printed NCERT textbook corrected this statement. And secondly, this is a simple and logical physics question that even a student in 10th class would know the answer to. So the question arises: who are these students reading a 6-year-old edition of the textbook, and when were grace marks given to them? These were the three reasons stated by NTA , which are full of factual and logical loopholes.
The next question was, who are these six toppers who got grace marks due to insufficient time? Do these six toppers belong to the same exam center? It’s possible. These six toppers were among those 1,563 students who got grace marks due to loss of time. And some of these students got 718 or 719 out of 720 marks. Which is technically impossible to score because you will either get +4 for a correct answer or -1 for a wrong answer.
So, under normal conditions, a person may score 720 on this exam or 716 or 715. 718 or 719 is not possible. These two students who got this score are from the same Jhajjar Centre that had the other six toppers. When NTA was asked the reason for these grace marks they said many NEET 2024 candidates had filed petitions to the High Court of Punjab and Haryana. Those students claimed that they had to suffer because of a loss of exam time, so NTA gave them grace marks to make up for this.
And to give them grace marks, They referred to a 2018 Supreme Court judgment.
Sign the Petition for Reconduct.
According to that judgment, a standard method can be normalized and calculated to see the grace marks for the loss of time. But now the thing is that the 2018 judgment was about the CLAT exam for law. And this judgment was written in this category Admission to Educational Institutes Other than Medical and Engineering. It was written that this judgment cannot be used for Engineering and Medical exams.
So the question is, how did NTA use it? How many grace marks have been allotted strictly? Which formula has been used strictly? And if time was lost, why wasn’t the exam extended by 10-20 minutes? Why did they rely on the grace marking system? People allege that this points to corruption and that this is a scam. The matter doesn’t end here.
The Junior Doctors’ Network of the Indian Medical Association raised another issue. Before the results were declared, NTA released an OMR sheet, Optical Mark Recognition Sheet, which is a student’s answer sheet where they have filled in the answers to the MCQs. This is done so that students get a fair idea of their scores. But the problem is that many students got completely different marks in their scorecards as compared to their answer sheets.
Take the case of 18-year-old Arshita. on her OMR sheet, it was written that her score would be around 384, but when the final results were declared, her score was 308. A difference of 80 marks.
Another student, 21-year-old Shoaib, said there was a 10-mark difference in the scores of his OMR sheet and final results. There were so many problems, and before the evidence of these problems could be collected, the results were declared ten days in advance. And these weren’t any random ten days.
Sign the Petition for Reconduct.
Strategically, the NEET results were announced on the same day the 2024 Election results were declared. 4th June, the day when the country’s media was busy covering the 2024 General Elections. Were they trying to cover up a scam amidst the commotion of the elections? There are a lot of questions, and now even the Supreme Court has directed NTA to answer. The Supreme Court has said,
“The sanctity of the exam has been affected, so we need answers.”
Many people have raised their voices on social media. Opposition leaders Rahul Gandhi, Sanjay Singh, Akhilesh Yadav and MK Stalin are also demanding an investigation. They have promised to raise this issue in the Parliament as well. With increased pressure from these things, on 8th June, NTA announced that the Education Ministry will set up a 4-member panel to examine this issue. More than 40,000 students have signed this petition, they demand that this exam be conducted again.
Even after this, NTA says that the integrity of this exam has not been compromised. “Integrity, etc., of this exam throughout the country is not compromised.” Integrity refers to the sanctity. The Supreme Court used the word. I want to ask which exam has retained any form of sanctity. In every other exam, we see the same paper leaks and irregularities. Does our government even care about the future of our country?
India’s education minister is Dharmendra Pradhan. He was appointed in 2021 Even after the election results, when the new government was formed, he was made the Education Minister once again. But if you check out his Twitter (X) account, he seems less of an Education Minister and more of Narendra Modi’s PR Minister. From top to bottom, you will see Narendra Modi’s face. Modi’s has been mentioned in every other tweet. “Modi again” “Modi 3.0” Modi this, and Modi that.
But if you find any tweets about the NEET exam. Forget NEET; find any tweet related to education on his Twitter account. Because of such people, our country’s education system is in this state. Mr Dharmendra Pradhan should tell us how much he has worked for education in India over the last three years. Until and unless we hold these leaders accountable, we cannot find a solution to such wrongdoings and mismanagement. They hold all the power.
Sign the Petition for Reconduct.
And this is a question of our country’s future. Our students’ future. And the medical infrastructure of our country. After putting so much pressure, today’s latest update is that finally, NTA has agreed to remove the grace marks, and the 1,563 candidates who were given the grace marks now have the option to either retake the exam or accept their score without the grace marks. This is the right solution for the problem caused by the grace marks. But what about the other issues? Paper leaks, inflated scores, Six toppers from the same center.
NTA has yet to answer these questions. Keep raising your voice collectively like this, Remember, we must never lose hope. In 2022, more than 13,000 students committed suicide because they were depressed because of this education system. I can understand how frustrating it must be to deal with such a system. But at the end of the day, you must remember that an exam is not everything. An exam does not determine your life. So, always maintain your courage.
