New Delhi, India – India’s key medical school entrance exams and research programs have come under unprecedented scrutiny amid mounting evidence of corruption and paper leaks, leaving the futures of more than three million students hanging in the balance.
The National Testing Agency (NTA), an autonomous body under India’s Ministry of Education responsible for conducting national exams, is at the center of these controversies over the integrity of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), a national exam for medical aspirants. held last month.
Exam results on June 4 revealed grade irregularities and a dramatically high number of toppers, with a wave of arrests in different parts of the country for alleged paper leaks and multimillion-dollar frauds.
Since then, several students have approached the Supreme Court and state high courts, staged protests in the scorching heat and organized campaigns on social media platforms demanding independent investigations and a re-examination. Around 2.4 million candidates took the NEET, competing for 100,000 places in medical schools.
On June 19, Narendra Modi’s newly formed coalition government also canceled the National Eligibility Test (NET) that selects candidates for publicly funded research grants, just a day after a million students wrote the paper. This followed reports that questions had been leaked “on the darknet” and circulated on Telegram, Dharmendra Pradhan, India’s education minister, said on Thursday.
The minister, however, did not specify how the role was compromised. “Leaking of questions is an institutional failure of the NTA. We are ensuring that there will be a reform committee and that action will be taken,” he said. “We will not compromise transparency. The well-being of students is our priority.”
Meanwhile, India’s opposition leaders and legal experts have criticized the Modi government for its failure to crack down on corruption in the country’s elite exams that determine who becomes doctors and academics.
“NTA literally has a job to do [to conduct exams] and failed miserably,” said Rishi Shukla, a legal researcher in Lucknow who has helped in several legal petitions against the NTA.
“The careers and lives of millions of students are at risk. The discrepancies in these exams carry a whiff of large-scale corruption in the system.”
Impossible numbers and a ‘wasted dream’
While the country was focused on the results of India’s national elections on June 4, the NEET results surprised students and teachers alike: 67 students scored a perfect 720 out of 720, up from two students last year. Two years ago, the winner had obtained 715 points – the candidate with that score this year was in 225th place.
At least two students scored 719 and 718 out of 720, a statistically impossible result in the NEET marking system (+4 for correct answer and -1 for incorrect answer), doubling doubts over several students’ allegations of irregularities in results.
In response, the NTA defended itself by saying that several students received “grace marks” – awarded by examiners at their discretion – in cases where candidates lost time during exams due to factors beyond their control.
“The loss of exam time was found and these candidates were compensated with deficiency notes. So, the marks of the candidates could be 718 or 719 as well,” the NTA wrote in X. However, the agency did not disclose the parameters used for awarding the free marks.
Finally, he informed the Supreme Court in a hearing that the agency would cancel the grace notes and conduct a new test for the 1,563 students who received these marks.
“There have been problems in the conduct of the NTA since the start of this year’s NEET exams,” said Shukla, the legal scholar, who has also written to the Supreme Court and the NTA demanding an impartial investigation monitored by the court.
“This agency was formed in 2013 with the aim of centralizing the examination and preventing lower-level paper leaks and corruption. However, now they have lost face.”
NEET tests students in physics, biology and chemistry with 180 questions, and the exam was conducted in over 4,500 centers across the country, where students answered multiple-choice questions by filling in bubbles corresponding to different answers.
Where 304 students scored 700 marks or more in 2023, that number has risen to 2,100 this year. A candidate’s score in the highly competitive NEET is vital in securing admission to a medical college in India.
In a statement shared with the press, the NTA awarded the high score to a larger pool of candidates, increasing by almost 300,000 from 2023. However, questions about the integrity of the exam aside, this year’s unusually high scores represent another challenge: earlier, an average of 550 marks could guarantee a place in government-run medical schools, which in total account for 56 thousand places.
No more. The remaining places are in private schools that charge exponentially higher fees than public colleges.
For aspirants like 19-year-old Pratibha, this reality represents the end of a dream. She said she does not trust the re-examination promised by the NTA for students who receive grace marks.
“This new test is an eyewash because the government is clearly protecting corrupt people,” she said, speaking from her home in Odisha state on India’s east coast, requesting that her surname not be used because fears punitive action.
“I spent my adolescence [years] for this dream to wear the white coat”, said Pratibha, interrupting the call. “It all seems like a waste now. I got good grades, but not the classification. My family doesn’t have the money to send me to a private college.”
How much is NEET paper worth?
Last week, Pradhan, India’s education minister, vehemently denied the possibility of NEET paper leakage. However, police in the eastern state of Bihar, where Pradhan’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rules as part of a coalition, say they have obtained a confession revealing paper leaks.
A senior police official in Patna, the capital of Bihar, confirmed to Al Jazeera that one of the men arrested accused of leaks confessed to gaining access to the newspaper the night before the NEET exam – for almost $36,000. Under Indian law, a confessional statement made to the police is inadmissible as evidence in court.
Reacting to the Bihar police’s findings, Pradhan said on Thursday evening that the ministry was in touch with the police and was awaiting a detailed report. But he rejected calls for a re-examination of NEET, unlike what happened with NET.
“Some errors are limited to specific regions. The culprits, including someone from the NTA, will not be spared,” he said. “An isolated incident [Bihar paper leak] it should not affect thousands of students who took the exam sincerely.” One lakh, an Indian measurement, represents 100,000.
But the arrests in Bihar are not an “isolated incident”.
In Gujarat, the western state that is home to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and also governed by the BJP, police revealed details of a scam in recent days in which at least 30 students from distant parts of India turned up at a center.
They allegedly paid between $12,000 and $50,000, involving private training centers, teachers and a supervisor at the exam center, to pass the test. Five individuals have been arrested so far in this investigation.
As New Delhi baked under a heat wave on June 20, Varun Choudhary, the national president of the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI), the student wing of the opposition Congress party, gathered protesting students and arrived at the residence of Pradhan, the minister education center. They were quickly taken away by the police.
Choudhary told Al Jazeera that protesters spread fake notes in front of Pradhan’s residence in New Delhi, “because we are ready to give money to that corrupt minister, but we need to secure the future of our students.”
There is no evidence linking any government minister to any irregularity in the conduct of the exams.
“It must be the first time that the thief has confessed to a robbery, but the owner says everything is fine,” he said, referring to the confessions claimed by the police. “NTA is unable to carry out any examination and has become the epicenter of these leaks. We demand the banning of the NTA and the dismissal of the [Pradhan].”
“The government is playing with the future of more than three million students,” he said. “Now, there is a deep distrust between students and exams. Is this a fear you want to instill in your future doctors and academics?”
While hearing a series of petitions, the Supreme Court also criticized the NTA, saying, “If there is even 0.001 percent negligence on the part of someone, it should be resolved thoroughly.”
However, the court did not ask for postponement of allotment of post-NEET medical seats, scheduled for July 1. The next hearing in the case will be on July 8.
One nation, one exam?
However, opposition leaders – many of whom have criticized NEET because it replaces a series of tests conducted by the state government with a single national exam – have targeted the Modi government’s handling of the medical exam.
“Tamil Nadu was the first to say that NEET was a scam and now the entire country has started saying so,” said MK Stalin, chief minister of the southern state of Tamil Nadu. “We will certainly finish this one day. It’s our responsibility. Society, financial or political situation should not be a barrier to your education.”
The chief minister of neighboring Kerala, Pinarayi Vijayan, also accused the federal government of “gross inefficiency” that undermined the credibility of the exam at the national level. “This repeated incompetence is unacceptable, leaving students in limbo and wasting public money,” he wrote in X.
Taking a dig at Modi, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Thursday said, “It was being said that Modi ji stopped the Russia-Ukraine war. But for some reason, Narendra Modi has been unable or unwilling to stop the paper leak in India.”
Ahead of the 2024 elections, a BJP announcement suggested that Modi had managed to halt the Russia-Ukraine war to ensure the escape of Indian students trapped in the war zone – a claim that the country’s own Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected.
Akhilesh Yadav, head of the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, demanded a court-monitored investigation. “Those guilty must receive the most severe punishment,” he wrote in X.
The controversy swirling around NEET and NET is set against the backdrop of growing questions about India’s competitive exam industry.
Every year, thousands of students flock to private training centers that have grown up in cities like Kota in the western state of Rajasthan, and which claim to know the magic tricks needed to get a student into an engineering or medical school. cutting edge.
But the gloomy classrooms and high-pressure atmosphere at these training centers also create a nightmare that accompanies dreams of success: the rising suicide statistics in cities like Kota have even inspired a Netflix drama and several films.
Just a week before NEET was to be held, another student was found hanging in his room in the dusty city of Kota. “Sorry Dad, I couldn’t do it this year either,” read a note found near his body. The student was unable to secure a place in the last two attempts and had to attend for the third time. It was the tenth death by suicide in Kota since January this year.
“We have turned our education system into a pressure cooker, and it has been exploding for some time now – mismanagement of such a highly centralized form of examination can inflict irreversible trauma on students,” said the head of a reputable government-run medical center . school in Rajasthan, requesting anonymity to “save” his job.
“This ‘one nation, one exam’ doesn’t work in a country like India,” he added. “The sooner this government understands this, the better for the future of our students.”
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
