NEET: An Entrance Exam or an Elimination Machine?

What is the real purpose of this torturous process? Is it really designed to identify the most capable and deserving medical aspirants in the country, or has it been designed to eliminate as many students as possible before they even get a chance? NEET is not even about survival of the fittest at this point but more like survival of the fewest possible.

The torture begins long before we enter the examination hall. It starts with the registration process itself. Trying to register for NEET took me an entire day -one whole day- just to submit an application for an exam. When you first open the registration website, you are met with a reassuring message that the process has been "made easy" and can be completed in "three simple steps." Once you begin, you realize that each of those steps branches into dozens and dozens of sub-sections, instructions and forms that never end. The sheer number of requirements is overwhelming. Many of the fields are worded so confusingly that we often struggle to understand what information is actually even being requested. Instead of feeling guided through the process, we are left second guessing and overthinking each step, scared that one small mistake could destroy our chance of even writing the exam. What makes it even worse is that most of the information they need is already with them in their databases. When we are required to provide details such as our Aadhaar number and other verified identity documents, why can't at least some of this information be automatically filled out? Why do we have to enter lengthy personal details and navigate complicated forms when it isn’t even required at all? It seems like they have just made it as convoluted as possible just so that they can reject as many people's applications as they possibly can. 

Let’s say you manage to make it through the grueling process of registering for this exam, we reach the next stage- the exam centre. They seem to be making it a goal to assign centers as far away from the address that you have provided as they can. I'm not talking about the extreme cases like when they assigned a center in Abu Dhabi to a student in Nagpur, but when you are assigned a centre in your own state, it seems to be their mission to assign you a centre that is at least 1-2 hours away from you. If they don’t have the capability to assign centers based on your geological location, then why not just collect the district or state name and do the same thing? Why do they collect so much information from us and waste so much time making us fill their forms when they have no intention of using it?

Now once you begin preparing for the exam and take a closer look at the kind of question papers that are being designed, it makes me ask, have they created this paper to test whether students have understood the concepts that have been taught and whether or not they know how to utilize that information, or if they are trying to figure out who can just memorize the most amount of data possible. When you look at their exam and the way the questions have been designed, you can clearly see that it has not been made to test students' logical thinking capabilities and scientific reasoning but whether you can remember the vaguest names, formulae and information from a random line in your textbook. This is why there are so many coaching centers that focus on making students sit and memorize every single line of the book because that is what works for the current exam design. Their students are performing the best and getting the highest ranks because they have created an exam that makes sure that a student does not think, does not have any intellectual curiosity, but is a data sheet. I have seen people from these places who have cleared neet and have had exceptional ranks, but have not even been able to pass the first year of Medicine because they just don’t understand the concept of what they are studying. They are like people who can read and write a language but don’t understand the meaning of the words in front of them. They do not even have the basic foundations of the science they read day and night, and when the purpose of medical education is to create doctors who can reason, analyse, and make life-changing decisions, that should concern all of us. It’s very clear that understanding is optional, but memorisation is essential.

Now let’s get to the experience of actually going to the exam centre to write your exam. The exam starts at 2 o’clock, but the center itself closes at 1, and you will obviously not plan to reach at 1, you’ll want to be at the very least one hour early, so a maximum of 12 o’clock. You’ll also want to plan keeping in mind a risk of traffic or maybe a road closure, or any other issue on the way there, so you’ll be even earlier. I've already mentioned their habit of giving you a centre super far away so you’ll have to start very early to be there on time. From all this you can understand that to leave your home early, you’ll be up even earlier to get ready, keep everything in place and eat your breakfast. Then we have the exam from 2-5 after which it takes 30 mins-  1hr for the centre to allow you to leave thanks to all the security checks, so lets say 6 o clock. From early in the morning to at the very least 6 o clock in the evening they make students sit and write the most important exam of their life without any food. How ironic that they have made medical students follow unhealthy eating habits. 

Even when I was entering the hall for my exam, the queue for frisking itself was so long that you couldn’t even tell where the line ended. It took at least an hour to reach the front of the line and only after you have passed the frisking you are considered to have entered the centre. Some schools have made good arrangements and planned well but that’s the exception rather than the rule and most of my friends have also experienced these rushed centers overwhelmed with parents and students. They also do not allow a student in if they are even one minute late, so I wonder what Modi was doing in that airport till 2 o'clock when the exam centers have long closed, I wonder whom he was helping by literally doing nothing. Shows us the logic they have at the very top itself. 

On top of that, most centers do not have proper provisions to provide drinking water and words don’t need to be said about the condition of the washrooms, all you need is one whiff of the stench. The other major problem with most centres is that they do not even have a place to deposit your personal items. Students who reach the center via bus have nowhere to deposit their bags, documents or money. They are just expected to drop it off on the footpath. I mean you would think that the people conducting a national exam would have the basic logic to provide at least provisions for that. I have seen just before the exam, so many girls who may have an earring or a nose ring that is made of gold and they were made to take it off and leave it behind in some bush or tree. I have seen them crying and scared about what will happen to their expensive items. How do they expect them to focus on an exam when they put them through things like this? Inside the center, most places do not have any signage to guide you to which room your exam will be in and no guidance to find it. Even the invigilators seem to have no training on how to conduct the exam properly. They don’t even follow the basic common sense of staying silent during the exam, as many times another invigilator will come in and ask about some random rules or timings, or they will just be gossiping. They even provide snacks, biscuits and juice for the invigilators which they eat in front of the students as if to taunt us and remind us of how hungry we are. Even when you exit the centre, there is no planning or crowd control, there are people rushing around searching for their kids, people climbing trees in hopes to spot them, shouting, just a big mess. For an examination system that successfully extracts over ₹4,13,36,00,000 (413 crore) annually from its applicants, I wonder what they have been spending the money on, considering its impact remains entirely invisible to the very students who provide it.

Then after going through all that you find out that the paper has been leaked. Then you find out that it has been leaked 25 times over the last 10 years. If a house gets robbed once, you can blame the robber but if it happens 25 times, something is wrong with your lock and it’s your fault for not protecting your house properly. And after it happens so many times, you put the same guy in charge of conducting it again. Because that’s what happens when you do the same thing in the exact same way- something different happens. At this point in time, they are just playing around with the lives of students. There have been so many suicides in the past month, but I think they should be considered murders when the people causing responsible know exactly what is going wrong and continue to allow it to happen. And now after so many people have exposed their mishandling and flaws, they have started filing cases on people who talk about the leaks, saying that they are spreading rumors. So they are putting their maximum effort not to make sure that the paper doesn’t leak again but to make sure that people don’t find out that it has leaked. They say that they have brought in the Air Force to transport the papers - not once over all these years that the paper has leaked has it happened in transit. How is this in any way solving the problem? It is like putting a band aid on your knee after you got punched in the nose. At the end of the day, I’m not sure these knee jerk reactions will fix the massive issues in the system and give us the best doctors of tomorrow.

Ultimately the pressure that this system and NEET is placing on everyone is literally and psychologically killing more people than the students who want to become doctors can save. 

- Nayonika Suravaram