Reforming medical admissions beyond NEET
The government’s decision to set up the Nandan Nilekani Task Force on Public Examination Reform is a welcome move. However, the committee’s mandate should extend beyond administrative improvements. The fundamental policy question is not merely how to conduct examinations more effectively, but whether a single test should remain the sole benchmark for determining who becomes a doctor—and whether students will ultimately benefit from such a system.
NEET: A foundation worth preserving
NEET remains one of India’s most consequential educational reforms. It dismantled a bewildering maze of entrance tests, curbed capitation-driven abuse, and established a uniform national benchmark. These gains in fairness and transparency must be preserved.
Yet, preserving NEET does not require treating it as the only measure of merit.
Testing knowledge, missing the doctor
A three-hour high-stakes examination measures performance under pressure; it cannot measure consistency, resilience, empathy, and sustained effort. Qualities indispensable to clinical practice. A student demonstrating excellence across two years of higher secondary education provides evidence built over hundreds of classroom hours. Another may suffer an off day due to illness, anxiety, or socioeconomic barriers.
Educational assessment confirms a simple truth: repeated measurements provide a far more dependable picture than a single high-stakes event.
The goal of medical admissions is not to find the best test-takers, but to select the best future doctors.
A balanced formula for merit
India should consider a composite admission model combining statistically normalized Board examination scores with NEET results. The precise weightage, whether 50:50 or another ratio, must be determined by experts rather than political expediency.
Also, whether the composite marks based on Board exam marks and NEET marks should be the criteria for selection, or should seats themselves be allotted in that proportion, is also worth considering.
Critics will argue that reviving Board marks risks returning to the pre-NEET era of inconsistent standards and local manipulation. It need not. Modern statistical normalization can adjust for varying state standards while maintaining a centralized, transparent admission process.
NEET should remain India’s common benchmark, but not its sole gatekeeper.
Reclaiming schooling from coaching factories
Recognizing school performance would restore integrity to secondary education. Under the present system, twelve years of schooling are rendered secondary to a single test. Classes XI and XII have increasingly devolved into extensions of coaching centers, training students to crack an exam rather than master science.
Valuing normalized Board scores gives students a reason to engage deeply with their school curriculum year-round. Coaching would lose its overwhelming dominance, allowing education to reclaim primacy over examination strategy.
Levelling an unequal playing field
A common examination guarantees equal rules, not equal opportunity. Urban students with access to specialized coaching, elite teachers, and high-speed internet hold a distinct edge over equally talented rural peers.
As Dr Devi Shetty, Founder of Narayana Health, has often argued, the qualities that make an excellent doctor extend far beyond test-taking ability, and rural kids have fire in the belly and will serve better as doctors in rural areas, which are highly underserved.
While a composite model cannot erase systemic inequality, it rewards sustained effort over time rather than concentrating a student’s entire future into a single day. Leading global universities already combine school performance with standardized tests for this exact reason: important life decisions should rarely hinge on a single measurement.
Easing the high-stakes pressure
Every student suicide is one too many, and each is a profound national tragedy. But it would be intellectually dishonest to attribute every such loss solely to NEET. While student distress stems from complex factors including familial expectations and mental health struggles, an admission system that overweights a single three-hour window compounds psychological pressure. De-escalating that single-event anxiety is a moral imperative.
Even the best admission system can’t eliminate every tragedy. However, a system that rewards sustained performance rather than concentrating so much weight on one examination may reduce psychological pressure for many students and minimize the tragedies.
Increasing the number of medical seats must continue alongside admission reform; they are complementary, not competing goals.
The next stage of reform
NEET solved yesterday’s crisis by replacing fragmented entrance tests. But no reform should be immune to refinement. A mature nation refines its institutions as evidence accumulates.
The next phase of reform is not to dismantle NEET as some demand, but to move beyond the belief that one test alone can define human merit. A great admission system should identify not merely those who excel in an examination, but those built to excel in medicine.
Note:
1. Text in Blue points to additional data on the topic.
2. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of PGurus.
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