The retest for the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) undergraduate examination conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA) on the orders of the Supreme Court has hardly made a dent in the overall ranks of the larger pool of aspirants.
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After the NTA came under fire for arbitrarily awarding grace marks, the agency stated that it would withdraw the grace marks and issue a retest option for 1,563 candidates, of which only 812 candidates turned up for the test on June 23.
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The scores of the retest were declared on June 30, and withdrawal of grace marks as well as the retest scores have led to revision of ranks for the entire lot of over 23 lakh candidates who appeared for NEET-UG 2024.
Nitin Sinmar, a 21-year-old who gave his fourth attempt at NEET, scored 665 marks out of 720 for which he had got the 17,495th rank. After the revised ranks were uploaded on NTA website, Mr. Sinmar observed that his rank was revised up by 26 positions to 17,469. Even after the revision of rank, Mr. Sinmar said it does not make much of a difference. “This is because in my third attempt, I had scored 635 out of 720 and my rank was 11,880. This year, even with a better score my rank has slipped 5,589 positions,” Mr. Sinmar said. “At this rank, I will not get admission in a good medical college in the State quota in the first round.”
For 17-year-old Tushar Sen who scored 640 out of 720, he was shocked to see that his rank was 39,428 and even after the revised ranks were announced yesterday, it improved by only 38 positions. “According to last year’s records, I was expecting my rank to be between 8,000 to 9,000. Even if my rank had changed by 500 or 600 positions then it would have been helpful, but such a small revision does not make a difference,” Mr. Sen said. He was expecting to get admission into a good State medical college in Haryana but has now lost hope.
‘Need to analyse ranks’
Dr. Krishan Sharma, parent of an aggrieved NEET candidate, said it is important that the Ministry of Education and NTA should put the data of the top 50,000 candidates in the public domain. “We want to analyse if the toppers are concentrated in clusters or are randomised across centres,” Dr. Sharma said.
Parents are also demanding that the data of candidates who applied for sitting in NEET when a special window was opened for the third time, be made public. “We believe that approximately 24,000 more candidates were squeezed in when a special window was created at the fag end before the NEET-UG exam was due. We want their result data analysed separately,” Dr. Sharma said.
According to SC orders, the counselling process for MBBS admissions is due to start on July 6. “We need to analyse the data before that in order to recognise patterns,” said Dr. Sharma.
While the Ministry of Education has maintained that NEET-UG 2024 question paper was simpler as compared to the previous years, which led to many students getting higher scores, students and parents say that the question paper was close to the same level as that of last year. “The question paper was not that different in terms of level that it can lead to such a huge inflation in rank. There has got to be another reason, which needs to be investigated,” added Dr. Sharma.
