‘NEET PG date before next weekend,’ says NBE Chief Abhijat Sheth

Sheth said a plan has been shared with the Ministry of Education (MoE) for approval and accordingly the exam date will soon be intimated to students. “We are hoping to conclude the process in two months,” he added.

Why was NEET PG cancelled?

Talking about why the exam was cancelled 12 hours before it was about to start on June 23, Sheth clarified that “there were no reports of a paper leak or any other kind of such issue.” The exam, as per the NBE, was cancelled as the “Ministry wanted to check the robustness of the exam process, and we wanted to be sure that there is no vulnerability in this process.”

Stating that several exams of the National Testing Agency (NTA) were already cancelled, the NBE chief added that the situation was “overly sensitive” this time.

“A leak in the NEET PG exam is not possible, as our exam is conducted in a computer-based test (CBT) format, which means that everything is done online and the question paper is not published anywhere. Usually, we generate the question paper almost an hour before the exam, so there is no possibility of a paper leak.

“However, there are some miscreants in our society who take advantage of the vulnerability of students in such tense situations and tell students that they can help them pass the exam for a fixed amount of money. In such cases, they take half payment before the exam and then if the student passes, they claim it is because of them. If the student does not clear the exam, these miscreants run away with their half payment.

“Considering how sensitive the situation already was this year, we wanted to avoid such a situation where fraudulent agents could take advantage of students, and that’s why this step was taken,” he explained.

Strong SoPs

The NBE has been conducting NEET PG for the past seven years, and not once has there been any reported incident of a paper leak, Sheth claimed. This, he said, is simply because the Board has stringent SoPs regarding the conduction of an exam.

“We have very strict SoPs for conducting this exam, and we ensure that all rules are followed. Additionally, this year, the government has advised us on a few more points, and we plan to implement them in the future. The advised SoPs are for more audits on application and exam process, some on how to improve human resources, and more. All the points raised by the government are doable, and even though we may not be able to implement them right away, we plan to implement them in the near future for a lifetime benefit,” he added.

NEET controversy

This year, the NTA has been at the receiving end of a lot of criticism due to issues with the NEET UG results, which were announced on the day of the Lok Sabha election results (June 4) – 10 days before the scheduled result date. First, an unusually large number of candidates (67) got the perfect score of 720/720. Then, some candidates got 718 or 719 – marks others claimed were not possible in the scheme of the exam.

Later, the grace marks for 1,563 candidates who had faced a loss of exam time were cancelled, and a retest was conducted for these candidates on June 23 – the same day when NEET PG was scheduled. Meanwhile, the NTA is also facing allegations of question paper leaks in Bihar and Jharkhand. Following the same allegations of paper leak, the NTA also had to cancel UGC NET and CSIR UGC NET exams.

Last week, the Education Ministry announced an expert committee headed by former ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan to look into exam reforms and review the NTA’s functioning. The Ministry also removed Subodh Kumar Singh as NTA chief, and Pradeep Singh Kharola was given the charge.