NEET's problems: Look deeper

We should not just solve the proximate symptoms

- AJAY SHAH & VIJAY KELKAR

Failures in the operations of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) have aroused much ire. It is possible to think about the NEET problem statement and improve its implementation. We should peel the layers of the onion and go deeper. Why should every medical college in India be subject to central control of how it admits students? Why is there so little medical education?

Our first instinct is: We have a failure of operations, so let's go do the operations better. We can add more policemen and armoured cars to protect the papers from leaking. This is a bit of a mug's game, given the extreme supply-demand imbalance in medical education and the high incentive in favour of examination fraud. There are too many civil servants involved at too many points in the process. It is not wise to ask flawless performance of government organisations in India. As with most policy problems that we see in India, we need better thinking and not mere execution of poorly thought out concepts. How could we do better than the worm's eye view?

A better centralised examination

Why should there be a high-stakes examination, organised in person all over the country, on one date? In fact, putting an identical question paper in front of multiple different candidates is well known to be an inefficient statistical estimator of the candidate quality.