With the Supreme Court order canceling the government’s ambitious project of having a centralised and uniform admission system for medical colleges in the country in the form of the National Eligibility and Entrance Test (Neet), students and academicians alike are in a quandary over the future course of action. Students, who will be the most affected due to the court order, say all their efforts will now go in vain; however they are also happy at the prospect of having better scope of getting a seat in medical colleges in the state.
According to a professor teaching at a tutorial in Dadar, specialising in preparing students for Neet, the court order would change the entire approach towards entrance exams preparations. “As Neet was being conducted by the CBSE board, the format was based on their curriculum. The state board also changed the curriculum to be in tune with the same. Due to the vastness of the syllabus, students aspiring to pursue medicine were made to study the new curriculum over the first and second year of junior college, as the Neet question papers would be based on that,” said the professor.
However, with the SC order canceling it, the states will now have to conduct the entrance tests on their own as they did before Neet was implemented. But with the changes in the curriculum, the task will now become more cumbersome and challenging for the state authorities to prepare questionnaires based on the new curriculum.
Students, though flustered with the new development and confused as to their future, are inwardly happy with it. “In Neet, we had to compete with students across the country for a seat in a medical college. The seat allocation could be anywhere in the country and we would have no option but to accept the seat allotted in any part of the country. But as Neet has been trashed, our chances of getting a seat in a state college are confirmed,” said Sudhir Patil.