NEET: We can’t resolve our admission test fiasco with snappy answers

livemint.com:

The nation is yet to recover from the shock of how the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) has crumbled under the weight of its own contradictions, discommoding over 2.3 million aspirants who took the centralized examination for admission to undergraduate medical courses. Its collapse shows all that is wrong with the government’s education policy, highlights biases in its people selection policy and also underscores its centralization tendencies. The NEET’s introduction was not such a bad idea, considering the systemic malaise that existed earlier.

The surging demand for medical education collided against limited availability of seats in government colleges; private-sector entrepreneurs stepped into the breach, repurposing admission tests and cut-offs as extortionate revenue sources, with blessings from the political class. In addition, many states conducted separate entrance tests. An earlier attempt to consolidate most entrance tests under the All India Pre-Medical Admission Test, NEET’s predecessor, was scrapped by the Supreme Court due to similar problems of paper leaks and testing irregularities.

NEET’s breakdown has led to the usual hand-wringing, followed by a routine reshuffling of personnel and boilerplate promises of tighter supervision. This only manages to kick the problem down the road, giving time to ingenious and corrupt forces to regroup and find new ways of gaming the system. There is simple economics at work here: when 2.3 million students vie for only 106,000 medical seats, something has to give.