Granular data on NEET is out, some centres outperform

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.

This year’s examination was conducted at 4,750 centres in 571 cities, including 14 abroad. The results, declared on June 4, first sparked controversy when 67 candidates achieved perfect scores of 720, with some of them belonging to the same examination centre. A retest of these candidates and the rollback of a grace-mark decision since has changed their results.

Officials at the NTA did not respond to requests for comment on the data release and its implications.

The lack of a conclusive proof of mass-cheating can be seen by comparing the success rate of a centre (measured here as the proportion of candidates at the centre who finished in the top 1%) with that of the city.

By that yardstick, some centres indeed have a high proportion of students who ranked in the top percentiles. For instance, 8%-10% of candidates at Tagore P.G. College in Rajasthan’s Sikar, Junior Baselios English Medium School in Kerala’s Kottayam, and Danta Mahavidhalaya in Sikar finished in the top 1% of all NEET candidates, the highest at any centre within India.

However, these success rates were only 2.3-5.7 percentage points higher than those of Sikar and Kottayam overall, both known coaching hubs. No other centre’s performance departed by more than 5.7 percentage points from their city’s performance.

The data also revealed an intriguing anomaly in 17 centres across Haryana, Gujarat, and West Bengal. These centres had an unusually low proportion of candidates finishing in the bottom 50% — less than 35% and at least ten percentage points below their city’s average. However, their proportion of top 1% performers remained close to their city’s average, complicating attempts to draw definitive conclusions about potential malpractices.

Keshav Agarwal, a member of the Coaching Federation of India, expressed concern over the concentration of high scorers in certain areas. “The result has shown shocking data and the concentration of high scorers has come from Sikar, Gujarat and Haryana and majority of the places are small towns and surprisingly Kota is missing,” he said. “From Gujarat itself we have 3,400 students above 600, from Sikar 4,300 and Haryana around 1,200, which is 11 percent of the students who have scored 600 plus all over India.”

Agarwal added, “The result definitely is skewed and this is just one year and if 2023 data is released then definitely there will be a lot of abnormalities and if comparison with board exam scores then many more aberrations will be seen and matter is much beyond paper leak and difficult to segregate beneficiaries.”

The data also showed that centres previously flagged for irregularities did not display unusual performance patterns. For example, at Oasis School in Jharkhand’s Hazaribagh, where the principal was arrested in connection with the NEET exam, only 0.71% of candidates finished in the top 1%, similar to Hazaribagh’s overall rate of 0.66%.

Similarly, at Master Adityendra Government Senior Secondary School in Rajasthan’s Bharatpur, where a case of impersonation was reported, 0.71% of candidates finished in the top 1%, below Bharatpur’s overall rate of 1.4%.

The Supreme Court’s scrutiny of the NEET-UG’s validity is currently limited to two separate instances of paper leaks in Patna and Hazaribagh. The court emphasised that its decision on potentially scrapping the exam and ordering a retest will depend on whether the breaches were localised or systemic.