On May 5, after a tense 3.2 hours of answering 180 questions, 18-year-old Jind resident Shubham Lohan, expected a near perfect score of 705/720, in what would be his second attempt at the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) that qualifies students to study medicine.
Lohan says he attempted the test again this year because he hoped to improve his score for an MBBS in one of the 20 premier All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) that offer nearly 2,000 seats. He quickly calculated his possible score based on the answer key provided by his coaching class. The test is multiple-choice-based, and scores are calculated through a computerised system based on Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) technology.
“I was expecting to get admitted to AIIMS Jodhpur or Rishikesh,” he says. But a month later, when Lohan received the mark sheet, he was shocked. “My score was 705 (out of 720), but my rank was inflated by almost four times, to 1,177,” he says. “I belong to the General Quota, so I have next to no expectations of bagging a seat in AIIMS,” says Lohan, who has dedicated two years after school towards NEET preparation. He was hoping for a rank of about 300 based on the previous years’ records.
Over 2.3 million students like Lohan appeared for NEET. Of these, 67 got full marks, as revealed in the list of top 100 candidates that was attached in the public release. Since this had never happened before, students and their parents were thrown into confusion because even those who scored what would be considered a high mark were pushed down in the ranking system.
Further developments
Two days after the results, the National Testing Agency (NTA) that conducts NEET and a few other centralised entrance exams, revealed through a press statement that “grace marks” were given to 1,563 candidates for “loss of time”, when exams began late in some centres. Marks were also given for an error in a Physics concept in the NCERT textbook.
Students began demanding a re-exam. After the results were declared on June 4, public interest litigations (PILs) were filed in the Supreme Court demanding a fair probe. The NTA was compelled to open a probe, but the four-member committee is headed by Pradeep Kumar Singh, the chairperson of NTA, the very agency that has found itself in the eye of a storm.
In its decision on June 13, the SC ordered that the compensatory marks be cancelled and those students be given an option of a re-exam.
India has a little over 60,000 MBBS seats in government medical colleges with fees as low as ₹10 lakh for five years. These limited seats are available to top rankers, this year to over 13 lakh who have qualified. In a private medical college, of which there are another 50,000-odd seats, fees could go up to ₹1 crore or more. The rest of those who clear the exam but don’t make it to medical colleges, may choose allied subjects like dentistry, physiotherapy, and veterinary sciences.
Editorial | A NEET mess: On the conduct of the medical entrance test
Widespread anguish and protests
Over the past week, protests have erupted across the country from Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi to Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. Temperatures touching 46 degrees Celsius are not deterring desperate students from organising day-long sit-in protests outside the NTA office in Okhla, as well as staging demonstrations outside the Ministry of Education housed in Shastri Bhawan, a stone’s throw away from the Indian Parliament.
On Wednesday, the protest at Jantar Mantar, organised by student outfits National Students’ Union of India (NSUI), saw sloganeering led by “NTA ki taanashahi nahi chalegi (The highhanded approach of NTA won’t work),” and “We want reNEET”. A poster forming the backdrop read, “24 lakh students demand exam not scam”.
The protests in Delhi brought together students from Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and other institutes, uniting left-leaning and RSS-affiliated student outfits like the ABVP. While the All India Students’ Association (AISA), along with aspirants and parents, submitted a memorandum to the education ministry, ABVP called for a CBI probe into the matter.
Virendra Kumar Verma, 48, who participated in the protest outside NTA says he is crushed to learn about the irregularities in the way the exam was conducted. Originally from Bihar, Verma now works as a daily wager in Dwarka. “It has been our dream to see our daughter become a doctor…. She put in 14 hours a day, for three continuous years. Now, it is disheartening to see the system fail students like us.”
His daughter, Kanakpriya, 22, appeared for the test without coaching. Her score improved from 536 in 2022 to 631 in 2024. Kumar added, “I could not afford coaching classes. This is why it took three attempts. We were hoping that she would make it this time because she has worked very hard. We are fighting because the children deserve a retest.”
Nearly 140 kilometres away from Delhi, 48-year-old Priyavrat Verma in Mirchpur village, Hisar district in Haryana, shows off his son Harsh’s NEET score, published in a local newspaper. Harsh, 17, who graduated from a local senior secondary school, scored 645/720 in his first attempt. Priyavrat says he felt his son was assured of a government medical college seat in Haryana, going by last year’s college placements.
“PGI Rohtak or Kalpana Chawla Government Medical College in Karnal would have been easy for Harsh to get,” says Priyavrat, sitting with his wife in their three-room home. As per last year’s results, Harsh would have got a rank in the 7,000 range; now, he is at 34,056.
Every day in the last year, Harsh would travel over 35 km to attend coaching classes in the neighbouring district of Jind. “The coaching fees is ₹1.65 lakh per annum. I could not afford this after I lost my job, so I pawned off family gold and asked friends for money for my son’s coaching. It breaks my heart to see him study so hard for an exam which now stands compromised,” Priyavrat says.
Students in Jind are shocked by the inflated marks and are demanding that the National Testing Agency conduct a re-exam in a fair and transparent manner. | Photo Credit: Sushil Kumar Verma
NTA’s alleged lack of transparency
Since the start of NEET in 2016, every year only one candidate achieved the highest score until 2019. In 2020, two candidates got 720/720, and in 2021, the number of toppers rose to three. In 2022 and 2023, one and two candidates, bagged the full scores, respectively.
Of the students who got full marks, six candidates — with one each from Rajasthan and Delhi — were from just one centre, Hardayal Public School, in Haryana’s Jhajjar district.
“We want an analysis of data of the top 50,000 candidates to be put into the public domain to understand which centres the aspirants belong to, and if there is an issue of ‘clustering’ of toppers in other centres too,” says Dr. Krishan Sharma, a veterinarian and parent of an aggrieved candidate from the neighbouring Jind district.
Twelve candidates from the top 100 had Haryana as their exam centre; another 11 had exam centres in Maharashtra, and 18 toppers had their exam centres in Rajasthan. Among those who chose exam centres in Rajasthan included candidates whose home states are Himachal Pradesh and Jharkhand. “The probe therefore should not only be limited to one particular exam centre in Jhajjar,” says Poonam Sain, another parent.
NTA in its official statements have still maintained that the exams were conducted in a transparent manner. “We respect the SC’s orders and are now aligning steps to comply with it,” says NTA director general Subodh Singh.
The legal recourse
Three petitions were filed in the Supreme Court, including one by Alakh Pandey, founder of Physicswallah, an ed-tech platform offering online coaching, who had issued a legal notice to NTA on June 7 three days after the results were declared, before moving SC.
Pandey says that while the level of the examination papers was similar to the last five years, 2024 has seen the highest increase in the average marks (323 out of 720). From 2020 to 2023, average marks have hovered between 259 to 279. He wonders whether “there are more issues that exist that we are oblivious of”, since “the issue of grace marks was addressed only when we pointed it out”.
NTA justified awarding grace marks only after questions were raised in the media about the technical impossibility of scoring 718 or 719 marks, as NEET comprises of four subjects — Physics, Chemistry, Botany, and Zoology — with 45 questions on each subject carrying a weightage of four marks per question. “So if a student gets one answer wrong, then they get 716/720. NTA has given grace marks in the most whimsical fashion and not disclosed the original scores of students or the exact grace marks awarded to them,” Dr. Krishan said.
The NTA responded in a press conference, saying grace marks were along the lines of a 2018 judgment which followed a similar recourse for the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT). Dr. Krishan says that CLAT is an online exam, and grace marks to candidates were given in a measured manner after technical glitches in attempting the exam were observed.
“NEET on the other hand is an offline test. If the exam started late in a few centres, the students of those centres should very well be given extra time to finish the test, instead of awarding grace marks in an absurd manner,” he says. Dr. Krishnan and a few other parents have written to the additional deputy commissioner of Jind district, Dr. Harish Vashishth, airing their grievances.
Another coaching chain, Allen Career Institute has also written to NTA on June 8 demanding a free and fair investigation. “The lack of clarity surrounding NEET 2024 not only jeopardises the aspirations of millions of students, but also potentially undermines the integrity of the future of the medical profession,” Nitin Kukreja, CEO of the institute stated in a letter to NTA.
Allen has also stated that 26 out of 67 students who were given 720/720 have been the institute’s students. “One of these is Jahnvee, a resident of Rajasthan who wrote the exam in the Jhajjar centre,” says Dr Manish Jangra, founder, Federation of All India Medical Association (FAIMA). Her calculated score is 636/720, based on her answer sheet, but she scored 720/720. “On what basis has NTA given grace marks?” says Dr. Jangra.
Getting the better of the system
As the grace marks questions rages, the Bihar Police have begun to investigate a case of an alleged paper leak; multiple arrests have been made. In Patna, police officials of the Economic Offences Unit, have recovered the leaked NEET question paper which they had retrieved as evidence. They are awaiting NTA’s response on whether the questions were matching.
The SC has directed the NTA to file its response on the alleged question paper leaks in two weeks. “The arrests and FIR related to the exam leak suggest deeper issues that may not be resolved by simply offering retests to a subset of candidates,” says Dr. Jangra.
Added to this, FIRs were registered across States in cases of impersonation. On May 5, as students were dispersing after writing the NEET exam from Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan on KG Marg in Delhi, Sumit Mandoliya, 19, and Krishna Kesharwani, 22, were detained. Ajay Bhardawaj, the Duty-of-Centre Superintendent appointed by NTA to ensure that the exam went smoothly, filed an FIR at the Tilak Marg police station. In it, Bhardawaj stated that Mandoliya and Kesharwani were impersonating the identities of Aksh Astaan and Jai Raj Kaushik, respectively.
Senior police officials investigating the case say that through advanced artificial intelligence tools, middlemen who had arranged for the alleged cheating had merged features of the impersonator, also referred to as ‘seater,’ with the original candidate. “Both impersonators belong to poor families in Varanasi and Rajasthan, are MBBS students, and were promised ₹10-12 lakh to write the exam,” say police.
They also say that middlemen charged candidates ₹25-30 lakh to hire impersonators. The impersonators were caught after their biometric scan at the exam centre did not match the Aadhar card biometric data of the candidate whose name had been registered to appear for the exam. After over 48 hours of a cat-and-mouse game, the police caught two middlemen Prabhat and Kishore from their Greater Noida hideout. Similar impersonation FIRs have also been lodged in Ambedkar Nagar and Malviya Nagar police stations.
“The NTA started matching biometrics for the first time this year. The arrested middlemen admitted to operating exam solver gangs since 2015,” the police said. “In yet another manner of cheating, at times candidates are asked to leave their OMR sheet blank if they do not know the answers, and those are then filled retrospectively with the help of middlemen at the centre,” a Delhi police official said.
While Pandey wants an independent enquiry into NEET 2024, it is the aspirants who are caught in the chaos. Many cannot afford to take another year off to study, several feel defeated because their futures have been boiled down to a rank, and most have lost trust in the system. Everybody asks for #ReNeet.
(With inputs from Ashna Butani)
