When the NEET results were announced on June 1, for the first time since the test’s inception, four students from Tamil Nadu made it to the top 10, with Prabhanjan J from the state topping it. The students certainly deserve our respect and accolades, but, their success still does not justify the NEET.
The DMK government and political parties in TN oppose NEET not because students here are ill-equipped to clear NEET but because entrance exams leave behind students from marginalised sections of society. Even if one looks at the percentage of students entering the IITs from Tamil Nadu, nearly 80% are from Chennai (a majority of them from certain schools).
When the Regional Engineering Colleges became National Institutes of Technology in 2002, and students were admitted on the basis of an entrance exam rather than school marks, the number of students entering NIT Tiruchy from rural areas fell by four times while the number of students joining the institute from Chennai increased manifold. Does this mean there is no talent in the rest of TN?
No, it simply means that certain people have access to resources and know-how. Success on an entrance exam is not merit. The very idea of merit is abstract, and can be even termed treacherous. Naively, in many quarters, merit is considered to be one’s performance in a competitive exam. But this view is oblivious to many external factors such as caste-based cleavages, parental exposure, schools attended, living environment, childhood abuse or neglect, among others.
A child born to a Dalit family in a rural village will have 10 times less exposure and resources compared to someone born in Delhi to an upper middle class family. The former is likely to attend a school with poor infrastructure, work part-time to support his parents, while the latter is likely to be enrolled in one of Delhi’s best schools, his parents having already decided on his future, giving him an early-mover advantage. How could ability or talent be measured in such a scenario? Would it not be unjust if both these children are made to face the same exam, and their application is decided solely based on the results of this exam?
Linking the future of millions of children or adolescents to their performance on a single competitive exam such as NEET, which is trainable, is unfair and unjust. This simply perpetuates inequality. All leading universities, including Ivy League institutions in the USA, are starting to rely less on entrance exams for admission of students from marginalised backgrounds. A 2017 study by economist Raj Chetty and others on the role of colleges in intergenerational mobility in the US showed that chances of someone from a rich family (top 1%) attending an Ivy League school are 77 times greater than for a person from a poor family (in the bottom 20%).
Similarly, as per the Justice AK Rajan committee report in 2010, 80.2% of English medium-educated students and 19.79% of Tamil medium students were admitted to various medical colleges in TN. But in 2017, after NEET, 98.41% of students who got medical admission were English-medium educated. Only 1.6% of students who secured medical seats were Tamil-medium educated.
Data from before and after the introduction of NEET show that the exam heavily favours non-first generation college student. In 2010-2011, the percentage of first-generation (FG) candidates securing medical seats was 24.61% (non-FGs securing admissions stood at 75%). In 2017, after NEET, this dropped drastically with only 14.46% of FG candidates securing medical seats, leaving the rest (85.54%) to non-FG candidates. Similarly, most students who pass NEET seem to be from a CBSE background and most CBSE schools are expensive.
The discrepancy is because entrance exams such as NEET are trainable; none of the entrance tests are designed to test the inherent intelligence of a person. A positive test result largely depends on the number of hours spent practising and teaching methodology used. Multiple choice exams such as NEET have a lot to do with pattern recognition as well. Most coaching centres train students to crack the tests but these coaching classes and specialized schools are also expensive. The school at which this year’s topper studied charges a fee of Rs 2.5 lakh per annum (when the per capita GDP of TN is only about Rs 3 lakh).
Therefore, rather than ask for the continuance of NEET based on the successful students, a better evaluation would be to compare the profile of students joining government medical colleges before and after the introduction of NEET.
Unfair to many
The DMK government and all the political parties in Tamil Nadu oppose NEET not because students here are ill-equipped to clear the test but because entrance exams leave behind students from marginalised sections of society
Footnote is a weekly column that discusses issues relating to Tamil Nadu
Salem Dharanidharan is deputy secretary of the DMK IT Wing, executive coordinator of the Dravidian Professionals Forum and an alumnus of the University of Oxford