NEW DELHI: Oriya was the least preferred language with less than 300 candidates writing the National Entrance cum Eligibility Test in the language while over 10 lakh wrote the entrance test in English, making it the most preferred language.
The entrance test for admission to about 1 lakh MBBS and BDS seats in the country was conducted on May 6.
According to the CBSE, which conducted the examination, a total of 13, 26,725 students took up the examination this year which was administered in 9 regional languages other than English and Hindi, but only 279 students wrote the test in Oriya.
Kannada with 818 students was second least preferred language while Urdu, which was introduced for the first time in 2018, was opted by 1,711 students.
Tamil was opted by 24, 720 students as compared to Hindi which was preferred by 146542 students. Gujarati, Marathi, Bangla, Assamese and Telugu were other languages in which students wrote their examination.
NEET (Undergraduate) is the only professional examination in which the question paper for Physics, Chemistry and Biology is administered in many national languages following the demands by several state governments.
The question papers in all the languages, however, were same this year, unlike previous years—following the directions of the Supreme Court after some students had approached the court saying that question papers in regional languages were tougher than those in Hindi and English.
The CBSE, in a statement, said that reports about depriving Tamil Nadu candidates of attempting question paper in Tamil were wrong.
“In fact, all candidates, who had opted Tamil as medium were given centres within Tamil Nadu, and were given question papers in Tamil,” said the statement. “In 4 out of 2255 centers in India, during the conduct of examination, when it came to notice that the medium of question paper was not correct for the candidates, CBSE immediately responded by providing them question paper in the language of their choice.”