The Supreme Court of India has revived from death the specter of a common medical entrance examination for all medical colleges. Ostensibly, the purpose of this common entrance examination called National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET) is to create a level playing field.
However, wide-ranging protests across many non-Hindi states, vehement opposition from students, doctors (especially rural doctors), non-commercial educationists, political parties and even social justice organizations have by now demonstrated that many fear that the effect will be exactly the opposite.
The palpable fear is that NEET will give a huge advantage to students of Delhi-headquartered boards like CBSE – which also tend to be more urban, richer, more upper-caste and less likely to be from non-Hindi states. In short, the exam will be unrepresentative in a way that will deepen already existing inequities that exist along various fault lines of class, caste, language, location and rootedness. Many fear this will destroy prestigious state boards as we know them.
While the NEET judgment was in response to admission-related corruption in private institutions, other reasons have been offered in its support. These include the relief this will provide students giving multiple entrance tests, lessening of corruption in the admission tests due to supervision of MCI and CBSE and, finally, the purported desirability of a common syllabus, which will ensure that similar grades of physicians are produced all around (a ridiculous idea, since medical entrance exams don’t make doctors, MBBS exams after admission do).
Firstly, most major states have already held their own state medical entrance exam. Private medical colleges are not located in air but on the soil of some state. A simple solution would have been to admit students through already existing state medical entrance exam. States like West Bengal and others have nearly four decades of experience of organizing transparent medical entrance exams. Why would the excuse of corruption somewhere be used to change admission policies everywhere is beyond comprehension.
Capitation-fee corruption for securing management quota of private institutions bothers only people who can pay lakhs and even crores – in short, not even 5 per cent of the students who take medical entrance exams. It is a problem of the upper-middle class and the super-rich which is masquerading as the “common man”.
On the question of relief to multi-exam taking students, it is important to take note of reality. What proportion of all medical entrance test takers across all states do they comprise and who are they? It is astonishing that no such data has ever been presented – possibly because anecdotal experiences suggest that this is a very small proportion of students.
The fact that the NEET judgment might imply science syllabus changes across many boards tells us how the stupendous majority is being victimized and marginalized for the convenience of a tiny minority. Among the major characteristics of this minority, what stands out is that it is the CBSE syllabus that will be followed for NEET. Is this the largest board in the Indian Union? No. Just Maharashtra state board has more Class XII students compared to CBSE all over the Indian Union.
If that statistic comes as a surprise to some of us, we need to seriously question our sense of standard and get out of our metro-centric Anglo-Hindi bubbles. Is that the ‘best’ board in some academic sense? Hardly so. Are students studying science in the 12th standard, in the CBSE format, uniquely equipped with an understanding of the sciences? Or, in other words, if the state boards are being forced to emulate the CBSE (in the name of aligning syllabi), is it something worth emulating?
Rigorous research work (published in Current Science, 2009) that reviewed the comparative performance of students from different boards showed that when it comes to science proficiency, CBSE is not numero uno. West Bengal board students did better than CBSE students in all 4 science subjects – Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Mathematics. Andhra Pradesh does better than CBSE in Mathematics and Physics.
By the same metric, Maharashtra is hardly the worst performing state as it was in NEET that was held in 2013 before it was scrapped. Tellingly, neither West Bengal nor Andhra Pradesh was the top performing state in NEET. Independent non-CBSE excellence has thus become an albatross around their neck. The CBSE ‘pattern’ of syllabus has become the standard, even though research shows it isn’t the best. States boards with syllabi that differ considerably from that of the CBSE are at an unfair disadvantage – they have to change or perish, for absolutely no reason. The viability or ‘worth’ of a board of education’s science syllabus then is not in how well it teaches science to the students but, incredibly, by how well it has adapted (or not) to the basic framework of a Delhi-based boards’ syllabus.
This will reduce the importance of the Class XII exam and we will increasingly see coaching institutes operating under the legal shell of a school. The schools affiliated to the state boards will rapidly become low-grade holding pens for the rural and the poor, while the urban middle-class will detach itself from them – taking educational apartheid to another level.
By completely disregarding the percentile obtained in Class XII board exams, Multiple Choice Question solving is privileged over detailed concept development, something boards like the West Bengal and Tamil Nadu board have been historically proud of and is evident in the over-representation of these boards among faculty members of science institutions, where the CBSE ‘advantage’ evaporates. We can’t even fathom the damage that this will do to science education.
This Delhi-headquartered board and the Anglo-Hindi bias in so-called ‘all India’ medical entrance exams are not new. Central board students (constituting less than 10% of Class 12 students) have till now enjoyed a de facto 15% reservation in all medical colleges, as the syllabus of the AIPMT exam (held in Hindi and English only – though no MBBS courses are taught in Hindi) through which these seats were filled was modeled on CBSE syllabus and conducted by CBSE.
Since Hindi areas have much less number of medical colleges per capita, the AIPMT is a system to lodge North Indian student in South and East India in disproportionately high numbers, under the innocuous dissent-stopping fig-leaf of ‘All-India’. The NEET seeks to create a hugely expanded version of this unjust dominance over all seats of all medical colleges in the Indian Union.
