Medical Education Minister Sharanprakash Patil has said that the Supreme Court quashing the Medical Council of India’s (MCI) notification for holding common entrance tests for MBBS, BDS and postgraduate medical courses (NEET) will not affect the State.
“National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test was not adopted here. We would have adopted it next year if it had been made mandatory. Then, it [the judgment] would have had a major impact. Now, the Common Entrance Test will naturally continue,” Dr. Patil said.
The State government had planned to adopt NEET from the next academic year.
The sudden turn of events, however, has left students in class 12/II PU who have enrolled in coaching centres offering NEET training in a quandary.
G. Sridhar, founder and managing director, Ace Creative Learning, said: “The bulk of students who are not exceptionalwere genuinely terrified of writing just one tough exam. With the scrapping of NEET, students and parents will surely heave a sigh of relief.” Vallish Herur, director, BASE, said that it was, in fact, a disappointing judgment.
“Now, students will have to take up multiple exams and streamline their preparation accordingly. The NEET exam was convenient, but it had issues that still needed some attention. There was no level playing ground. But, if implemented in the right spirit, it would have been convenient for students,” he said.
Even more disappointed were those students who wrote the NEET-UG exam this year.
Neeraj Doddamane, whose CET rank was 2,200 and NEET State ranking was 2,300 (all-India rank 45,000), said the earlier system was far better. “NEET came and created confusion. There was no point in its introduction as we ended up writing four or five entrance exams. The level of difficulty was the same between CET and NEET,” he said.
