Neet and (not) Clean

Lives - Give or Take?

4th June, 2024. Not another normal day for the nation. The entire India utterly tense on who will be their servant, friend, or ruler for the next 5 years. People choose ideologies, and colours, and debate them, whatever knowledge they have. But for some 23 lakh students, the scenario is different. Why? They have always dreamt of being a doctor, a white cloak of dreams. The results for the National Entrance cum Eligibility test were supposed to come out.

Some have checked the answer key and have suppressed smiles and tense sighs that they are going to be a doctor, as they have outmarked their ideal senior and will probably go to a nice government medical college of prestige. They will be looked upon by peers and cousins. Their parents will be proud.

A notification drops. The results are out. Wait, what? Is the sight glitching? No, no, the score seems fine but the rank is different. I can’t believe this. Her friends and family are waiting. Everything has gone in vain. The sleepless nights, the early mornings, the panic attacks - all disappearing right in front of my house.

The next day comes somehow after hours of looking back and remorse. It is 4 PM. Everything has crumbled. All the dreams and futures have faded away. Bagisha Tiwari, a NEET-UG aspirant, jumped from the 9th Floor of the building and ended all the suffering.

Not just Bagisha, Ajit jumped from a train in Dausa due to a backlash in his third attempt. Many of those students may be living dead, just registered to be “safe”.

So, was all of this meant to turn the people supposed to give lives, to take their own lives just like that? Is no one answerable?

Nothing Suspicious?

Suspicion #1: 67 students with full marks

An exam of national prestige, where the full marks finishers are looked upon with high respect and only picture-perfect execution and hard work can turn someone into a topper, suddenly stooped to such a level that 67 students are given AIR 1. How’s that seriously possible? An exam that has the word entrance in it is sure not to go as mild as board examinations on fellow students. Instead, it is indeed intentional to keep it harder in some or the other regard, to get the bottleneck effect.

Suspicion #2: Offline OMR Tamper

So, can we consider that the examinations are judged the right way? The suspicion is quite natural as the exam is one exam of its kind that is in the offline OMR mode, highly probable to have tampered over a bulk of cyber data in JEE.

Suspicion #3: Same Centre, Same Scores

It has also been found that 8 of the students are in sequential roll numbers - which indicates the students are supposedly from the same centre in Haryana, and that I think, is not a coincidence!

Suspicion #4: Grace-Full

NTA says it has awarded grace marks to some students who have got 718-719 in the NEET examination, a practically impossible score in an exam of marks +4 and -1 format. As NTA says, the students who have got into problems with time issues have gotten the unmoderated amount of grace marks to get such scores. Such nice of NTA.

My Opinion

This massacre that has occurred indicates several things. First, this is can be possibly some esteemed private institutions to a better place. The students who were bright yet got a rank undeserving of a government college, will be compelled, if financially backed, to go to good private colleges - both enriching the student base and the not-so-good ways of getting into those.

The legitimacy of the entire student base that is going to the higher rank institutions is still quite in soup. There is a lack of credibility in their scores, with disruptive grace marking for some considered reason - which keeps a chunk of Indian medical future into a great problem.

A re-examination is indeed a right of the students, but the preparation levels of the students who got their nerves relaxed may potentially hamper their results now as well. A considerable time must be put before the re-exam is given, even though NTA is reluctant to do some of that sort, even though we are trying to convey the same.

IRRESPONSIBILITY SHOULD NOT TAKE THE LIVES OF PEOPLE WHO ARE BORN TO GIVE LIFE!