Far from home, say NEET aspirants
After a week’s delay, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) announced exam centres for the National Eligibility-cum-entrance Test (NEET) for medical courses on Saturday. Students, however, are unhappy about being placed in centres far from their homes. They pointed out that in Maharashtra’s Common Entrance Test (CET) – which has been replaced by NEET – exam centres were assigned according to their preference.
“In CET, students had the choice of choosing sub-centres after choosing the city, like Andheri, Bandra, Colaba,in Mumbai. In NEET, students could only choose the city,” said Subhash Joshi, owner of a city-based coaching institute training NEET aspirants.
In March this year, CBSE announced names of 104 cities in the country to be considered as NEET centre cities. Maharashtra has 11 city centres, including Mumbai, Nagpur Nashik, Pune, Aurangabad, and Nanded, among others – the highest number of city centres allotted to any state.
While filling the NEET registration forms, a student had to pick a centre city of their choice but no choice of sub-centres were available. Students selecting Mumbai as a centre are included in a zone that also includes Nav Mumbai, Panvel, Thane and Rai gad. “As a result, a student resid ing in Kandivali has been allotted exam centre in Colaba and some one from Mahim has been allot ted a centre in Kharghar. This is going to be troublesome for many,” added Joshi.
Parents as well as students told HT that it looks like those stu dents who registered for the entrance exam early on have been allotted exam centres in South Mumbai and suburban Mumbai, while the late registra tions seem to have been allotted centres in Navi Mumbai, Panvel etc. “Some students who are coaching for the exam in Kota but are residents of Mumbai had given their first preference as Kota, but their residence being in Mumbai, they’ve been allotted seats in the city. They’ll end up missing out on last minute prepa ration with their classes to be back in Mumbai in time for the test,” said one of the parents.
With the NEET exam to be held across the country on May 7 barely two weeks away, parents feel not much can be done about the exam centres now. “Many students have already visited their exam centres to figure out how much time it’ll take to travel As of now, students should focus on their preparation and not the exam centre,” said the head of another coaching institute in the city.