New Delhi: The National Testing Agency (NTA) on Saturday released detailed data from India’s premier medical entrance exam, the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test – Undergraduate 2024 (NEET-UG), following a Supreme Court directive.
The release of this unprecedented level of detail for an exam of NEET’s scale comes amidst allegations of irregularities and cheating in the exam conducted on May 5. The Supreme Court, which is hearing several petitions regarding the alleged irregularities, ordered the NTA to publish the marks obtained by all students by Saturday noon, along with the centres from where they appeared but with candidates’ identities masked.
According to an analysis of the data by HT, while some centres showed a higher-than-average proportion of top performers, their success rates largely aligned with the overall performance of their respective cities.
HT’s analysis also showed that coaching hubs dominated the top rankings: Six cities — Jaipur and Sikar in Rajasthan, Delhi, Bengaluru in Karnataka, Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh, and Kottayam in Kerala — accounted for a quarter of students ranked in the top hundred.
There were certain anomalies in some centres. Seventeen centres across Haryana, Gujarat, and West Bengal showed an unusually low proportion of candidates in the bottom 50%, but without a corresponding spike in top performers.
The data also showed that previously flagged centres showed unremarkable trends. Centres where cheating or other anomalies were earlier reported showed performance either close to or worse than their city’s average.
To be sure, attempts to conclude or rule out a paper-leak benefiting a large number of candidates will be hard to detect statistically if such candidates are distributed thinly across centres.
The exam has been the subject of intense debate, with doubts cast over the fairness and integrity of a process that serves as the gateway to medical education in India. The concerns came into view after allegations of question paper leaks and inflated marking — issues that have become a nationwide flashpoint for political parties, leading to thousands of students protesting for weeks.
