Calvin has argued that NEET’s meritocracy is a fiction: the exam is cleared through coaching that costs lakhs, tests discipline rather than aptitude, and predicts nothing about the doctor a candidate becomes. 0M-3 answered that a single centralised exam is the one gate a poor student can afford to prepare for, and that the state-run alternatives leak worse (Punjab’s teachers exam, Rajasthan’s SI recruitment).
NEET is not a merit-detector. It is an eliminator: a rationing device for 1.3 lakh MBBS seats chased by over twenty lakh candidates. It measures stamina, drill, and parental cash flow routed through Kota. No serious person believes a three-hour MCQ paper identifies clinical judgement.
The capacity to grind for two years is itself inherited. The candidate who can study twelve hours a day is usually the candidate whose parents’ income buys the quiet room, the coaching, the repeat attempt, and the freedom from earning. Tamil Nadu’s Justice A.K. Rajan committee put numbers on this after NEET replaced Class 12 marks: Tamil-medium students fell from between 15 and 20 per cent of the state’s medical admissions to under 3.5 per cent, and the rural share of government college seats fell from over 60 per cent to about 50. The committee was a DMK creation and its framing has critics. The decline itself, taken from the report’s own tables, has not been seriously disputed. The inequality is made in the school and the household before any exam is sat.
But an eliminator must be judged against other eliminators, not against heaven, and the deep objection is true of every mechanism on offer; it does not help us choose between them. India has tried the alternatives. Fragmented state and college exams multiply the coaching bill by the number of gates; the rich sit twelve papers, the poor sit one. State boards leak more, not less. The pre-NEET dispensation was the capitation fee: privilege in its purest form, a price list, where the exam at least pretends to a syllabus. The American evidence cuts the same way; Stanford’s essay corpus study and the Chetty, Deming and Friedman admissions data show that the essays and extracurricular polish preferred by “holistic” admissions track family income at least as tightly as test scores do.
A single, cheap, anonymous eliminator is the fairest instrument the poor will ever be offered, precisely because it is crude. A crude gate can be gamed in one way only, by studying. Every refinement added to it (the interview, the profile, the recommendation, the management quota) opens a second way in, and the second way always costs money.
What the exam cannot do is redistribute. That work sits upstream, in the schools and households that produce the candidates, and pretending the sieve can do it is how the debate goes wrong on both sides. Tamil Nadu’s own remedy is the serious version of the equity objection: a 7.5 per cent reservation in medical admissions for government school students who clear NEET, created in 2020 after such students had almost vanished from the MBBS lists.
The genuine scandal is capacity. This year’s paper was sold before the exam by people on the NTA’s own question-setting panel; the exam was cancelled and twenty lakh candidates sat it again in June. The remedy is boring: an NTA with in-house staff; computerised adaptive testing, which leaves no single paper to steal; a syllabus aligned to school teaching so that coaching buys less advantage; and more seats, which shrink the rationing itself.
Those at Jantar Mantar demanding abolition should remember what admission looked like before a common exam existed. A private seat was bought in the trustee’s office at a known rate, with the receipt made out as a donation to the building fund, and the figures ran into tens of lakhs. That system never had a paper leak. The money changed hands before any paper was set. Poor families were never in the room.
And thats the biggest issue I have with those who support this ‘protest’. Not that the leak is ok, or that that idiot of an education minister doesn’t deserve to be fired. But that the whole thing is weaponizing a grievance and is being exploited for political purposes.
At that point, Dipshit, that other guy who got cancelled for eating a burger, the Yogendra Yadavs, Kejriwals, and the Ragas – they are all grifters.
thanks your comment forced me to think a bit deeper 🙂
I don’t think you know the meaning of the word grifters.
In the first case, the whole reason many of the paper leaks happen is because of governmental failures. For central papers like NEET it is the NTAs failure in preventing its leak that has to be critiqued. Then there is Dharmendra Pradhan who has neither assured the student and parents these things will not happen nor told what is going to be done and why things suggested have not been done so after the first NEET leak. When the government is not taking responsibility for its own failures the the protest against them becomes political by default. It is not the CJP that has made this political but the state and party that has failed millions of people.
With that out of the way, RG, Kejriwal, Yogendra Yadav and dipke are on the side of the students and are putting themselves in the line of fire, people who love to question others but can’t take questions thenselves does not make the people questioning grifter but those who promise to be accountable and serve the public grifters.
Please use at least half the harsh judgment you are using on those questioning your favorite people on your favorite people who themsleves had many opportunities to resolve but did not do so. Any negative PR is on them.
They are opportunists. Dipke had something going. Unfortunately by aligning with these people, it will only raise suspicions about his intent.
Everyone who has ever critiqued has an agenda.
With a person who does not even want to reassure, engage and clarify peopl3s genuine worry why is opposition to him so difficult to fathom.
Furthermore, if these peoppe are opportunists where is the anger and suspicion towards the ones being critiqued and their motives? Pradhan being pro active rather insulting protests would have taken care of all of this but I guess that is not something worth being angry over.
They’ve hijacked the agenda completely, giving the govt a respite from the scrutiny that it was under! Talk about pulling the rug from under the genuine protestors feet!!
Are we seeing the same visuals?
If the govt is under respite why did it launch the Delhi police, calling so many craft battalions and blocading entire metro stations. I don’t think respite is the rightward, what is a better word to describe the govts attitude is the name of a 11 season American TV show based on a British show of the same name starting Emmy Rossum and Justin Chadwick of dragon ball live action fame.
Dipke got helicoptered in from Boston. There is not a bigger example of an industry plant than the guy.
He was at the right place at the right time, and has done much more than all of uis detractors gave him credit.
Half the suspicion toward his own intentions should be given to Pradhan whose own lack of interest in even engaging proactively is why things have gotten to where they are. Please consider that the next time you think about Dipke, what are the intentions and morality of the people CJP is protecting against
Lets stop pretending that this is the first time that an exam paper got leaked.
Nobody’s defending Pradhan, or incompetence. But making a political tamasha out of it has a very different agenda. And its nakedly obvious. Its just a menagerie of random anti-Moooodi wannabes attempting to milk a hot button issue.
The exam leak is the main issue that brought this all out to fore but it is the dissatisfaction and lack of accountability, concern and impunity that is driving all sorts of people to this protest.
No matter what Godi media and IT cell as well as supporters of one favorite party are saying, not everyone is happy with the way things are going and we are now seeing this come from social media to streets amplified by the Delhi police own actions.
In a country where there are less institutions than aspirants and lack of opportunities outside of a few professions.
Calling entrance exams fair to the poor is nonsense. It is a good way to not ask why there are not enough institutions to accommodate 22 lakh aspirants of good quality.
If being fair to poor people is really a concern make state boards the standard for deciding medical admissions at least within the state. It will do wonder when a poor person on bihar does not have to compete with rich people from the south. Better if investment is made into actually making functional.governmemt hospitals to begin with.
//Those at Jantar Mantar demanding abolition should remember what admission looked like before a common exam existed. A private seat was bought in the trustee’s office at a known rate, with the receipt made out as a donation to the building fund, and the figures ran into tens of lakhs. That system never had a paper leak. The money changed hands before any paper was set. Poor families were never in the room.//
Those ar Jantar mantar are actually fighting for those the very poor people you are using to defend NEET. Please you take the time to see what they have to say about themselves, their agenda is to reform our country’s education system of which getting Pradhans resignation is one step to re inject accountability that has disappeared.
Abolishing NEET is not on the agenda though some of the people at jantar manyar may want that, this is normal in any popular protest where all kinds of individuals come for getting publicity of their own causes, many who want to delegetimize this protest want to hyperfocus on these individuals and not what is said on the main stage. People who believe intersectionality is not a natural thing with mass movements should wonder why they think so? What protests have they seen where only one cross section of people come and whether in those protests the actual participants were asked about their POVs or not
Haven’t we been asking this question since ’47? Do you think the answer has changed substantially enough to warrant asking the question yet another time?
If the notion that these entrance exame are indicators of quality or merit or that they are pro poor are notions thst are legitimately accepted clearly not enough.
Entrance exams generally ARE indicators of quality and merit.
Entrance exams are not “pro poor”. They are intended to be neutral to one’s wealth/income. But they are not neutral to one’s background knowledge and skills. Such knowledge and skills are, in almost all cases for specialized professions, acquired over an entire childhood’s worth of education. It’s not genetic, and it’s not like some flash of genius that anyone can acquire purely through IQ.
//Entrance exams generally ARE indicators of quality and merit.//
If majority of people studied on their own with no coaching then you could say so but the presence of coaching institutions,muddys the water.
It then ceases to be neutral to income given the fees that are charged, is not an indivicator of quality given that many of these institutes know how to game the system, and I don’t know how it can test merit when someone’s success is largely affected by having access to good coaching.
>It is a good way to not ask why there are not enough institutions to accommodate 22 lakh aspirants of good quality.
Yeah, because throwing stone at cops is a great way to ‘build institutions to accommodate ‘aspirants’.
The cops also threw stones at students.
100s of people are injured and some are even serious.
Plus if the people who threw stones are actually affiliated with the students we should see them be found out and arrested in a few days. If they are not, it heavily implies they are bad faith actors called by someone who is not a fan of the protests to delegitimize the
Also if some students are guilty should they have let themselves be brutally injured and beaten by a police with no restraint some of whose member threw expired tear gas and stones?
Monopoly on violence belongs to the state. You cannot break down barricades, assault cops and then cry about lathi charge.
You can’t have the cake of ‘peaceful protest’ while flipping cars.
Protest is a right, violence is not.
The violence was mostly peaceful until the police attacked.
In the first case, should the govt not have reached out to the protestors and heard them out weeks ago?
My zebra is a horse with stripes ass argument. The violence started with stone pelting from the violent protestors.
//The violence started with stone pelting from the violent protestors.//
The police are the only peope who we have footage of throwing stone without a face mask.
The other people who have done stone pelting are mostly covering their faces and given the resources delhi police has, it could have found them by now, why has it not?
Anyways it is not the CJP that had a truck full of stone called, they dissociated from that the moment they found it. Dont believe godi media so easily, this same tactic has been used to delegitimize protests for long time, this is probably the first time since the farmers protest it is not working.
The protest is already been discredited when they destroyed cars and vans like a riot from the 2000s. Get your mind out of this echo chamber you’ve been living in. This is a riot with a PR campaign, there’s rioters with swords rushing the cops.
The protests ars already growing in India and the diaspora, they are back in Jantar Mantar and are being supported by many more people now.
Because the only people who alleve isolated violence by some protestors after being attacked by the police while not even commenting on what the police did and still focusing more on the intentions of the protestors rather than are public servant are godi media and their followers.
If your viewpoint is similar to thr trash on godi media of all.places you are the one in the echo chamber, similarly if you still question and judge the protestors rather than our public servants who led to this state of affairs. Please be careful godi media and narratives similar to what it spouts.
Calvin please get your head out of the pigs trough and actually look at the violent act the mob is up to. If you are blind enough to not care about it do not assume the same about me. I do not care to discuss this topic further if you just want to justify violence.
Understanding that some protestors when being hit with pellet guns, tear gas shells and lathi as well as seeing their friend assaulted will respond violently is not a justification, it is understanding the difference between intentional and unintentional violence. The protestors did not march with intention to be violent. Many cow vigilantes who have never received a word of judgement or anger from any of the people angry at the protestors intentionally do violence if you cannot understand the difference
This playbook of taking selected incidents of violence, and then stereotyping a wholly peaceful and.legitimate protest has been done.many times and is being repeated today as well. You can’t see this is not my problem.
If you cannot see who are fighting for you and who is enriching themselves on your money then that is on you. I am not the one with my head in a pigs through as you say.
“mostly peaceful” doing some heavy lifting. Implies that cops just suddenly turned unprofessional and started attacking ‘peaceful’ protestors. When we have seen plenty of evidence of aggressive protestors breaching barricades, spraying pepper spray on cops, even a video of a RAF uniformed public servant being attacked en masse by a mob.
You are perilously close to justifying mob violence simply because it suits your political lens.
The playbook is overtly apparent. The multiple attempts by the protestors to provoke the police are on record. So is the blatant astro turfing with slickly edited music scored reels and videos.
//Implies that cops just suddenly turned unprofessional and started attacking ‘peaceful’ protestors. When we have seen plenty of evidence of aggressive protestors breaching barricades, spraying pepper spray on cops, even a video of a RAF uniformed public servant being attacked en masse by a mob.//\
I am not justifying mob violence, but the protestors did not attack first. Breaking barriacdes is not in the same league as lauching expired tear gas shells, lathi charging in plain clothes and even shooting pellet guns in our national capital.I can see clearly who have the power and whose actions and lack thereof caused this state of affairs, it is not the protestors.
The Delhi police has a history of being extremely violent to protestors, I have not forgotten how they stormed the libraries of Jamie even if you have. This case we had multiple police officers who were in plain clothes, flouted grooming rules( implying they were not from the delhi police) and even RAF people hid their name tags. Lets not talk about professionalism. For every video of police being unfortunately attacked there are multiple of the delhi police being brutal, ripping peoples clothes off, even if they are women, and firing tear gas that is expired!
This is probably the first time in my lifetime that pellet guns were used by the RAF in Delhi and you dont seem to be bothered by that at all.
Lets not even act like the Delhi police acted professional which many videos proved they did not.
The situation reached this far because those who should have engaged with them weeks ago neither did that and kindnapped sonam wangchuk in broad day light. Then treated them like terrorists when they wanted to go to a building they paid for, filled by their own servants. Had the servants cooperated with the ones who pay their salaries in organizing the march, and paying heed to them, none of this would have happened.
Yeah. This sort of Karen attitude towards police officers enforcing a barricade is on display in many videos. No wonder bunch of these protesters got caned. I would say, deservedly.
This is called accountability, where you give respect to the people who supported, voted for you and put you in power. If you ignore them, berate them, kidnap influential figures who are asking for a dialogue anger is justified, even if you need to bring down some barricades sometimes.
It is not a Karen attitiude, you should read Mr Pradhans tweets or watch some of Gsdkaris vides to know what a real Karen attidue is like. Hope you judge these people harshly for their numerous missteps once in a while.
Dear XTM,
I agree with a lot of the substance of your article, but why are “eliminator” and “meritocracy” framed as antonyms in your title? IMO meritocracy requires elimination, even ruthless elimination, and that’s the shape it’s taken wherever it’s been applied in the world.
(My comment is purely about this framing. I haven’t been following, nor do I care about, the protests or the politics around them.)
If these tests can’t be cleared without coaching then they are not meritocratic, definitely not pro poor that people are trying to portray them as.
Very good eliminators though.
In fact, standardized tests are one of the most meritocratic and pro-poor methodology out there.
Any ‘real man of genius’ who wants to talk about how ‘unfair’ standardized tests are, needs to first introspect on the alternatives, which are much much worse.
This is the problem with virtue-signaling self-styled Lelis – they are so lost in their own kool-aid and ‘smart’ sounding criticism echo chambers, that simple facts get ignored.
With coaching institutes becoming a necessity these tests are no longer meritocratic or fair. Any person who judges others should see the reality of the society they are living in first.
Making 12th board exams the only criteria for many state level colleges is much more fair and unbiased as are having more exams to distribute the competition.
It is also funny that capitation fees, extreme competition, stress, unfairness due to necessity of coaching, and things like management quota still exist but NEET is apparently fair.
why do you think 12th board exams are immune to the “coaching mafia”?
You can still clear 12th board by memorising and understanding your textbooks, without the need of coaching plus the individual states are much better at preventing mass leaks with most of the leans being localizer in nature.
Meritocracy has nothing to do with being “pro poor”. It means selection of the best fit (or most capable); no more, no less.
Of course it’s possible, for example, that a poor person with no education would have become a successful doctor if they had the right education and optimal amount of resources from an early age. But this is like saying that if a horse had stripes, it’d be a zebra.
At the time of taking tests to qualify for precious few positions in an institution that’s a finishing school for one seeking to practice a specialized profession (say, medicine), what’s the point of speculating about such hypotheticals? You have to select from those who are best prepared to be effective doctors (or another profession). These institutions are not going to make up for an entire childhood of missed education, however smart (i.e., g-loaded) an individual might be.
If those who are best prepared to absorb the education of an institution and to practice their profession effectively did so thanks to family wealth, that’s sad, but what else can you do? So I don’t see any reasonable alternative to testing (hopefully standardized)
//At the time of taking tests to qualify for precious few positions in an institution that’s a finishing school for one seeking to practice a specialized profession (say, medicine), what’s the point of speculating about such hypotheticals? You have to select from those who are best prepared to be effective doctors (or another profession). These institutions are not going to make up for an entire childhood of missed education, however smart (i.e., g-loaded) an individual might be.//
In glorifying these exams, the questions of why there are so less institutions or why are people so determined to only go for some professions are forgotten.
The reason we speculate about such hypothetical other than to push against notions that NEET is pro poor or fair as others have made, is thst most of the top schools are made with public money, that includes a large amount of indirect taxes, as well as arrears from labour that many underprivileged provide. If these institutions only cater to small subset who wete lucky enough to be born with the right resource to acquire ‘merit’ then is it really testing someone’s raw capability or rewarding luck for having been born into privilege.
Everybody works hard, some just are lucky enough to only be able to focus on studies. I don’t consider examinations that are agnostic to prevailing social conditions meritocratic.
Great eliminator, nonetheless.
>Everybody works hard, some just are lucky enough to only be able to focus on studies
Yeah, naah. I’m going to strongly disagree.
You can disagree but students from poorer backgrounds, do struggle from having inadequate access to coashing, privacy, in some cases even having to help their family out in work like with that poor girl Anitha from Tamil Nadu who committed suicide, because she could not afford access to coashing needed to clear NEET.
People like her are why I said options should be there. It does not impair merit, in any which way by allowing states to have their own criteria for admission.
in fact poorer students would prefer a single standardized test which they can ace and show their credentials than opaque extra curriculars and/or references. This is true even in NYC. Where rich liberals used equity agrument to kibosh a pathway for hard working poor and immigrant students to gain access to specialized high schools and tier 1 colleges.
We have all repeated it to him. It does not matter, he’s already made his mind up.
//in fact poorer students would prefer a single standardized test which they can ace and show their credentials than opaque extra curriculars and/or references. This is true even in NYC. Where rich liberals used equity agrument to kibosh a pathway for hard working poor and immigrant students to gain access to specialized high schools and tier 1 colleges.//
Please look at the indian situation and make arguments not the US
The poor here would be better served if they had to only pay for their college fees rather than being made to enter exams that help people with better access to privacy, coaching, and multiple other textbooks than what the stare prescribes.
The current NEET by needing people, to rely heavily on coaching to get decent ranks is pro-poor. Even others here havr said the same point while arguing thst NEET is meritocratic( which it isn’t)
The notion that coaching is unfair or illegitimate is quite crazy, but it’s a notion that refuses to die. I remember a friend (of a leftist bent) telling me a version of this back in ’98 or ’99; we both were in one of the IITs. What he said impressed me at first, because I’d never thought about these issues in philosophical terms (like most Indian kids), but my readings and experiences over the next few years made me realize how flawed it was.
Everybody benefits from coaching; it’s a driver of excellence. If it requires wealth, then blame skew in coaching on wealth inequality, but don’t blame coaching itself!
Take the FIFA world Cup for example. See the teams participating there. Then see the teams that do well in teenage competitions (like under-17). There’s a much higher diversity in the latter. So why do we see only the usual suspects (with a few exceptions) competing for the World Cup everytime? It’s superior coaching, management, institutions. What would be the alternative? Would you have reserved slots for teams like India? If we were to participate in a World Cup, we’d lose every game by a double digit of goals.
Criticism for the sake of it, because it aligns with a preferred political agenda.
Exams are bad. I mean come on. Public policy is never utopian. Its always easy to poke holes and allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good.
Yep it took a lot of berating yesterday for him to even accept the basic facts regarding the MMS administration.
What basic facts did I accept other than clarifying things you read into what I was saying because giving basic credit to upa, a govt you don’t like is difficult, something I don’t have a problem with.
Except Neet is neither good nor could it ever have solved the issues it was never equipped to do so.
NEET is amazing in comparison what came before it. The regional level exams with private colleges having their own entrance exams. Seats were practically sold to the highest bidder. That’s the world we would be in without NEET. You can critique it for not being computerized and more cheating proof in its architecture. But saying NEET hasn’t solved any issue is a gross mischaracterization.
//Seats were practically sold to the highest bidder. //
What do you think management and NRI quota is. This is just capitation fee in another name.
At least dont credit NEET for solving things it has not and was never built for.
Moreover than that, this is an enforcment problem, where police and state govts need to take charge of ensuring seats are not sold. This is not something that can be solved by changing an exam format. What ever issues NEET has solved, it has not solved this one.
The only thing NEET has done is standardized all the medical entrances, but at the cost of more stress, similar issues of seats being sold persisting under new names, greater influence of coaching institutes and money and now with paper leaks as well.
//Criticism for the sake of it, because it aligns with a preferred political agenda.//
Just because you disagree with something or can’t fathom a point of view doesn’t mean that it comes from support of a political agenda.
It may mean I actually thought about and have tried to learn about this country beyond, what agrees with me and changed my mind. You seem to have an issue in accepting that other people life experience has led to different conclusions than yourself or that the slice of the world I see is different from the one you do.
I have given my reasons for why I believe NEET is not meritocratic or fair, and if you would have read these I am not saying exams should be scrapped but a single standardised exam has neither led to reduction in capitation fees, corruption in private medical colleges through management quota, reduced stress and considering how much coaching costs, as well as how little the teachers thwre even care if you are not qualifying material, is nowhere near as fair as you make it out to be.
Propose alternatives. There are conclusive studies out there proving that standardized tests offer the most meritocratic and accessible policy tool to expand opportunity.
Criticizing NEET and ‘coaching’ is just utter waste of time. Policy isn’t about serving up fairness on a platter to 100% of the population. Its about making structural choices that work best.
I have been doing that all along.
Let states have their own internal assessments like with engineering, as I have repeatedly said an admission based on 12th board is much more pro poor and fair than a standard test that pitches people with different outcomes against one another.
This way at least paper leaks wont be as big an issue as otherwise.
The long term solution is to regulate private colleges, so that things like NRI quota, management quota stop and adding more medical institutions as well as reducing the intake by telling people what becoming a doctor actuallty implies and actually imporove teaching in various colleges, as well as aligning syllabus
NEET does not work best for a diverse country like India, as it is agnostic to the rural-urban divide, helps in increase of coaching that excercebates differential outcomes based on income and puts too much pressure on students for a single exame.
There’s…..so much just factually incorrect in this comment, that I’m simply not motivated to counter. You have some serious reading to do on education policy and outcomes.
I have done more than enough reading on this to know that these standardized tests are not the golden bullet that neither pro poor nor meritocratic, nor can they themselves take on issues with charging money despite poor fees, nor do they benefit those who are rural, poor or dont have access to coaching.
Our engineering admissions have not collapsed neither have NEET PG admissions, by having multiple options.
People also need to know that you can lose upto 30 years of your life just spending lakhs in preparation, with little to show for your investment, I dont think I need to explain the need of better enforcement on private colleges, as well as aligning the syllabus of all boards.
Dont assume others lack knowledge, just because it disagrees with your lived experience.
You don’t lack knowledge you ignore it deliberately. Almost every person on this website is telling you, that you’re wrong. Your knowledge is based on no studies, and relies only on your “lived experiences”. Engineering colleges work because the number of seats is close to the number of applicants such that almost every applicant can get a seat in some college. Medical colleges are not like that, only around 10% of applicants will get a seat. This is despite the number of seats doubling every decade. In such an environment an eliminator is the need of the hour, any other arrangement simply is more biased based on either geographical location, or resources available any such system would be less meritocratic and less pro-poor. You are simply wrong and I do not care to debate someone who has had this repeated to them multiple times and refuses to even change talking points.
It’s not like every person on this website is right.
The idea of an opposition that defied general wisdom is the essence of democracy.
It is not a good look if Calvin is painted as some sort of anti-national or irrational, when his points are very sensible.
But they aren’t. His ideas are basically thinly veiled justifications for shutting down national level programs and retreating to walled gardens for his own state. He is indirectly arguing for lower seats assigned to poorer states which don’t have as many medical colleges. He is smart enough to know thats what its going to result in. His ideas are an anathema to merit or social mobility.
Why is State Autonomy a bad thing necessarily?
//He is indirectly arguing for lower seats assigned to poorer states which don’t have as many medical colleges.//
I never said to scrap NEET but to allow multiple criteria for admission.
And you are aware that 85% of seats in government medical colleges are still reserved for students from that state only right?
You can still have a system where the AIS seats are filled with NEET or a similar exam and internal seats are filled through either state level exams or 12th boards, why do you directly assume that having multiple options is equal to scrapping NEET or going back to the old system.
You seem to be misreading my arguments because it sounds vaguely similar to what you may have read before.
Having multiple systems like the above costs nothing, and helps all kinds of merit. Dismissing it based on pre conceived notions of what I have said is something you need to think about.
I don’t think of Calvin’s perspective as ‘anti-national’ or irrational. Just because I disagree, and I am ….not afraid to say it bluntly/abrasively does not need to extrapolated any further than what I am saying. Calvin’s a big boi, he can handle disagreement without taking it personal.
//Engineering colleges work because the number of seats is close to the number of applicants such that almost every applicant can get a seat in some college. Medical colleges are not like that, only around 10% of applicants will get a seat. This is despite the number of seats doubling every decade.//
If you know this why are you acting like NEET is some panacea.
In the first place, should so many people want to become doctors if only 10% seats are available, is it too much to ask that before someone decides to go on this long jouney that can consume decades of your life that your chances are horrible and you should think and read carefully before embarking.
This whole medical coaching system feels almost as predatory as those ads from Byjus and white hate jr that prey on peoples anxieties, lack of knowledge and insecurities to sell them useless courses.
The funny thing is that the only data that has been given here is by XTM, who has quoted american studies that are not applicable to India both because of our inequality and bad public school systems.
//You don’t lack knowledge you ignore it deliberately. Almost every person on this website is telling you, that you’re wrong. Your knowledge is based on no studies, and relies only on your “lived experiences”.//
Everyone here seems to ignore or be unaware that private space to study, resources to get coaching, a school syllabus that is aligned with NEET are luxuries that many people dont have.
Repeating american studies that say standardized tests are more meritorcratic in a country where even having basic things like privacy is a luxury is where actual understanding of the country one lives in is showing.
It is even worse when NEET is credited for solving problems that are there like selling of seats that happens under new names, and something it was never enabled to do.
Why is everyone so attached to these dumb exams that mean nothing, and above all say nothing about what kind of professional one will be is beyond me. Rather than acting as if I am being stubborn maybe ask why these damn exams are so important to you, that you feel frustrated if someone says anything against them.
//In such an environment an eliminator is the need of the hour, any other arrangement simply is more biased based on either geographical location, or resources available any such system would be less meritocratic and less pro-poor. You are simply wrong and I do not care to debate someone who has had this repeated to them multiple times and refuses to even change talking points.//
Please lets stop acting that a system that needs expensive coaching to get decent grades in is pro poor, that is what is unquestionably wrong, not my insistence that NEET has not been successful.
And merit in a country like India, where birth plays a huge role in what resources you have, and even restrict access to public resources for large number of people is a contested concept. In any case, you guys need to explain why you are so insistent on protecting the honour of these exams?
>The funny thing is that the only data that has been given here is by XTM, who has quoted american studies that are not applicable to India both because of our inequality and bad public school systems.
Sorry, but this sort of blanket dismissal of data driven points, simply because they don’t align with your views, is…….silly.
>And merit in a country like India, where birth plays a huge role in what resources you have, and even restrict access to public resources for large number of people is a contested concept.
No, merit is not a ‘contested’ concept. This sort of dishonest lusting for socialist communist giveaways is what India needs to escape from.
There is no system that’s perfect. And structural incentives for merit are the ‘least bad’ alternative. Just because you don’t like it, doesn’t mean the Sun rises in the west.
//Sorry, but this sort of blanket dismissal of data driven points, simply because they don’t align with your views, is…….silly.//
Please share me data from India, that these kinds of test are meritocratic. I have outlined why I think they are not, would love to see what data from India says on these.
//No, merit is not a ‘contested’ concept. This sort of dishonest lusting for socialist communist giveaways is what India needs to escape from.
There is no system that’s perfect. And structural incentives for merit are the ‘least bad’ alternative. Just because you don’t like it, doesn’t mean the Sun rises in the west.//
Not everything is a socialist conspiracy just because it stems from acknowleding rampant inequalty in India. Talking about merit, when basic things like privacy and access to good books and teaching is luxury is a foolish concept, in a country like India, that has always been used to hide the debt many people owe to the large nameless mass of people who are the bedrock of our society. Lets not delude ourselves that doing well in exams like NEET are marks of merit.
India needs to acknowledge the realities of its social situation and not make solutions that only help a few, while letting many others slip through the gaps.
There is no system that is perfect and NEET despite the love that many here seem to have is not even good.
One can discuss the notion of merit and its pitfalls in the Indian context. In your comments, you occasionally use the word merit but what you think that means in the Indian setup is itself unclear. I am not sure how deeply you have experienced or studied the Indian education setup but the solutions you have been proposing are completely detached from the ground realities of the system’s reality today.
// In your comments, you occasionally use the word merit but what you think that means in the Indian setup is itself unclear.//
Nobody else has clarified merit either. But like in most conversations in India it is taken to mean inmate ability and command over material that has little to do with family background or social class.
If you look at these exams without looking at the larger system we live in, in a limited sense we can say NEET is meritocratic. But having parents thst can pay huge sums of money or personal relations with college principals, are not the only markers of privilege. Being able to afford coaching, having privacy, having a college curriculum.aligned with these exams are also marker of privilege and excessive use of them reduced the meritocratic value of these exams.
My main contention is that NEET should be one of the many exams that are done for medical entrance, so that one failure does not bring down the whole system.Furthermore rather than imposing one tests on all students it is better to impose one curriculum across states.
And despite my distaste for coaching I have not advocating banning them but we should see them as a failure in teaching rather than a blessing and improve teaching in colleges itself. And to stop glorification of these exams as some repository of merit.
Unlike some people here who seem to have studied elsewhere seeing as how they are using research from the US to justify NEET I havr done my entire education here in India.
//Everybody benefits from coaching; it’s a driver of excellence. If it requires wealth, then blame skew in coaching on wealth inequality, but don’t blame coaching itself!//
Everybody does not benefit from coaching, it take away many peoples childhood by selling dreams that the children neither wanted nor had a chance at to begin with.
That it actually focuses on more conceptual based knowledge which is where the driver of excellence comment is coming from, is due to exam questions evading a repetitive pattern not due to any quality within them that only focuses on gaming an examination and contributing to a culture that fills students with dread if they can’t crack one exam.
Please read about the loss of social skills, health issues, mental stress thst accompanies this horrid institution that we would all be better without.
//Take the FIFA world Cup for example. See the teams participating there. Then see the teams that do well in teenage competitions (like under-17). There’s a much higher diversity in the latter. So why do we see only the usual suspects (with a few exceptions) competing for the World Cup everytime? It’s superior coaching, management, institutions. What would be the alternative? Would you have reserved slots for teams like India? If we were to participate in a World Cup, we’d lose every game by a double digit of goals//
You use FIFA as an example but seem to not relate it to Indias condition properly. Indias main problem is that we lack and have never really stressed or punished our govt for not building institutions or asked why do we have a made rush for a few professions. The countries that win in fifa invest culturally, socially and economically in their children. India does not, not to the level needed. This glorification of these competitive exams is convenient way for the powers that be to hide this lack of investment.