NEET Selecting MBBS Students with 5% in Physics & 20% in Biology

NEET is making doctors with less than 20% marks in Entrance Exam – It’s true, score minimum 5% in Physics, 10% in Chemistry and roughly 20% in Biology and get admission in top medical college in India through National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET). This is the reason why do India not see any development, research or new finding in the field of medicine, because we don’t have merit ?

NEET ‘Percentile’ system has made it possible to get the medical seat in India with such low marks and  candidates have got admission to medical colleges in the past two years. 

Before , NEET was made mandatory in 2016, the cut-offs for admission were 50% marks for the general category, and 40% for the reserved categories. Post NEET implementation and introduction of percentile system these were changed to 50th and 40th percentile, respectively, opening the doors to candidates with just 18-20% marks in the NEET aggregate. 

Here’s how it happened ?

In 2015, you needed 50% marks for admission in the general category, so you would have had to score at least 360 out of 720 marks. But in 2016 you only needed to be in the 50th percentile, which meant scoring 145 out of 720, or barely 20%.

The reserved categories needed to be in the 40th percentile, which translated to 118 out of 720, or 16.3% marks. In 2017, this fell further to 131 marks (18.3%) for the general category, and 107 marks (14.8%) for the reserved seats.

This is believed that the story will be same this year also and students with 20%, may get through NEET 2018.

Demerits of Percentile System

If some one has scored 90th percentile, it doesn’t mean he has scored 90%. Percentile measures the proportion of candidates, not scores. For example, 50th percentile means students with more marks than the lower half, 90th percentile comprises students with more marks than the bottom 90%, and so on. It does not mean they have 90% marks.

Hence, the percentile system has detoriated the merit. This has made the low scoring students to get selected or you may say good for coaching institutes. The percentile system not only made low-scoring students eligible to study medicine, it actually got them seats in colleges.

The percentile system has made it easy for wealthy low-performers to buy seats. For example, 6.1 lakh of the 10.9 lakh NEET candidates qualified for admission, 5.4 lakh of them from the general category. With about 60,000 MBBS seats available across India, there were about 10 eligible students for every seat.

Here the game is, A large number of affluent students with poor scores got in as many high-scoring middle class or poor students had to opt out because of the high fees.

In 2016, general category students with just 148 marks, or 20.6%, in NEET were admitted to top notch private medical colleges. As many as 30 of the 100 students this institution admitted had less than 25% marks in NEET.

TOI reported that, A Puducherry college admitted 14 students with less than 21% marks, the lowest being 20.1%. Some students admitted in the reserved categories had even lower marks.

We beleive that Whether it’s an entrance examination or the Class XII exams, meritous students are expected to get a minimum of 50% or 40% marks, depending on their category.