Chennai: Affan Shehroz Umer, from Alwin Memorial Public School in Tambaram, is one among the one lakh-plus students who has been preparing for the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) exam scheduled for Sunday. Having studied for the past two years, he exuded confidence of scoring more than 600 marks in the test and securing a seat in a govt medical college this year. He took private coaching and prepared for the exam with NCERT textbooks. His school also held several mock tests over the past few months, in which he scored 550-620 marks consistently. His situation is far from the chaos that prevailed when NEET-based medical admission was introduced in 2017. Gopika from Thousand Lights, a topper in her school, is preparing for the exam by attending a crash course. She scored 482 out of 500 marks in her Class X and 564 out of 600 in Class XI exams. “I am focusing on biology and hoping to get 450 marks in NEET. The coaching costs about 2 lakhs a year. If given a choice, I would prefer admissions based on Class XII marks,” she said. While schools from Namakkal, Chennai and other cities have started to tie up with coaching institutes and started their own training centres, some schools have tried to experiment by tweaking their teaching and conducting mock tests. In 2023, J Prabanjan, from Villupuram district, secured the all-India top rank, scoring 100% on the 720-mark paper. That year, four students from Tamil Nadu featured among the top 10. The cut-off mark for NEET had increased for students in the general category, from 400 marks in 2017, to 650 in 2024. Low scores in 2025 lead to the cut-off being lowered to 550 marks. Coaching experts credit a denser network of NEET institutes, revised textbooks and state-funded training camps. “Over the past three or four years, we have seen that the performance of students from Tamil Nadu is proportional to the national performance,” said Manickavel Arugumam, a student counsellor. This is not the case for govt school student. For a few years after NEET was introduced, some batches had no govtschool alumni at all. The 7.5% reservation for govt-school students, enacted in 2020, was the state’s way of clawing back space inside a framework it could not overturn: a horizontal quota within Tamil Nadu’s share of medical college seats, with a separate merit list for those who clear NEET. “It was the first time hundreds of govt school students got into MBBS and BDS courses,” recalled former director of medical education Edwin Joe. Before NEET, the merit list was dominated by students from residential schools in the Namakkal region. Though NEET has changed this, more students have taken a break after Class XII board exams to spend a year or two on NEET coaching. According to Justice A K Rajan’s committee report, the number of 17-year-old entrants fell, as those re-attempting the exam rose from less than 1% before NEET, to about 70% by 2020-21. Officials say this trend continues as more than two-thirds of contenders now sit the exam at least twice. The test, which was meant to standardise merit, has embedded a new premium on time and coaching. “NEET coaching is not affordable for all. Our Class XII students are not able to get medical admissions and spend a year in coaching alone,” said G Jebadoss Thinakaran, headmaster of MCC Higher Secondary School in Chetpet. After S Anitha, a Class XII topper from Ariyalur, died by suicide in 2017 after not clearing NEET, the entrance exam blew up up as a political issue. State govt had presented an anti-NEET bill, which was rejected by the President, and is pending in court. Ten years on, NEET is firmly entrenched. Tamil Nadu’s bids for a full exemption have stalled in Delhi and, more recently, slipped down from even party manifestos.
