The cancellation of the NEET-UG, the national entrance test for undergraduate medical and dental courses, over leaked questions has prompted several academics to suggest a return to the practice of admissions based on Class XII board marks, partially or wholly.
Apart from flagging the repeated allegations of malpractice blighting the all-India test, some of them also raised a point of socioeconomic justice — exams like the NEET tend to punish students whose families cannot afford coaching.
C. Joseph Vijay, the new chief minister of Tamil Nadu, a state that has always been opposed to the NEET, has alleged structural flaws in the exam and demanded that medical colleges be allowed to admit students on the basis of their board marks.
Rajeeva Karandikar, chairman of the National Statistical Commission and former director of the Chennai Mathematical Institute, suggested a less drastic solution.
He said state-run medical colleges should be allowed to admit students from their states on the basis of a combination of NEET and Class XII scores.
"Students are focusing less on their school education and prioritising the entrance test. Still, the NEET has its own relevance; it cannot be scrapped," Karandikar told The Telegraph.
"National-level institutions can use the NEET alone to select students from across the states. But state-level institutions may be allowed to use a combination of NEET and board scores for students who wrote their Class XII exams in that state. The weightage could be decided by a suitable expert committee."
Most state-run medical colleges have an 85 per cent quota for the state’s own students in MBBS admission.
Karandikar said the IITs had over a decade ago half-heartedly implemented a similar process of giving weightage to both board and JEE marks before scrapping it. But the idea deserves another chance, he argued.
Onkar Singh, former vice-chancellor of the Uttarakhand Technical University, said: "The NEET and the JEE Main (for engineering admissions) are completely influenced by coaching. Students tutored to crack the tests do well."
He regretted that students with aptitude who could not afford coaching lost out.
Singh acknowledged that the difficulty of the questions and the leniency of the evaluation can vary from one state board to another, but said this could be addressed through the statistical procedure of normalisation.
Rajeev Kumar, former computer science teacher at IIT Kharagpur, emphasised that even the All-India Pre-Medical Test — which was replaced by the NEET in 2016 — had been beset with paper leak allegations.
Unlike the NEET, it was not mandatory for state-run colleges to adopt the AIPMT.
"After the NEET came into existence, there have been several kinds of controversies, including paper leaks and impersonations. The investigating agencies have failed to take any of these cases, not even the 2024 NEET paper leak, to its logical conclusion," Kumar said.
"In such a situation, the state governments, which are supposed to look after the welfare of their people, should be allowed to follow the admission process they think appropriate."
State-run engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu admit students solely on the basis of their Class XII marks. Therefore, for uniformity, state-run medical colleges there should have a similar admission system, Kumar said.