Parents demand re-examination in NEET, allege bias, paper leak

Chennai: TIMES NEWS NETWORK





Parents of medical aspirtants who appeared for the National Eligibility-cumEntrance Test (NEET) IN Chennai have asked for a re-examination in the wake of allegations over question papers being leaked and discrepancies in level of difficulty in the question paper in English and in vernacular languages. At a meeting on Wednesday , parents of candidates and members of Doctors' Association for Social Equality (DASE) said the papers had completely different sets of questions for English and vernacular languages

. While students who opted for Gujarati found the questions easy , those who took the test in Bengali found the paper tough. “In Tamil Nadu, most of the students who chose Tamil found the paper moderate but still tougher than English,“ said Dr G R Ravindranath, of DASE. “Why was there a bias? The questions should have been just translated“ he said. Dr Geetha, whose son took the exam, is among those who are demanding a retest. “The idea behind having a nationallevel exam is to assess students on the same level. But if the questions are different and the difficulty levels are different, the purpose is defeated,“ she said. The NEET exam was held on Sunday by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) at 1,921 Exam Centres in 103 cities across the country.

While traditionally the CBSE conducted the admission test in English and Hindi, this year it added eight vernacular languages including Gujarati, Assamese, Odia, Telugu and Marathi. Around 11.35 lakh students had appeared for the test across the nation.

A group of parents in the city along with DASE are drafting a letter to the CBSE, the Union Ministry and the Medical Council of India in this regard. Allegations of question paper leak in some states were also a cause of concern for parents.