NEET-UG exam soon to shift from offline to online, NTA to undergo re-structuring

Union Education and Health ministries are working on a proposal to switch the medical entrance NEET-UG from offline to online mode besides restructuring the testing body NTA which was recently in news for alleged irregularities including paper leak.

Elaborating on the proposed reforms, Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Tuesday said the education ministry has held two rounds of talks with the health ministry and a decision in this regard will be taken soon.

Mr Pradhan said, “The administrative ministry of NEET is the Health Ministry and hence we are in talks with them about whether NEET should be conducted in pen and paper mode or online mode. We have had two rounds of talks with the Health Ministry led by JP Nadda. Whatever option will be considered best suited for conducting the exam, NTA is ready to undertake the exercise”.

The Minister said the reforms will be implemented in the 2025 edition of the exam. “What will be NEET’s methodology, what will be the protocol…A decision is expected soon. We will notify it soon,” he added. Currently, NEET-UG is conducted offline – in pen and paper mode – wherein students have to solve multiple-choice questions on an OMR sheet. The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) is the largest entrance exam in the country in terms of the number of candidates appearing for the test.  In 2024, a record over 24 lakh candidates took the exam.

The minister also announced that the National Testing Agency will be vested of its role in the conduct of any recruitment exams from 2025 and the agency will exclusively focus on higher education entrance tests. The agency will be restructured next year and new posts are being created, he added.

“The National Testing Agency (NTA) will be limited to conducting only entrance exams for higher education and not conduct any recruitment exams from next year,” said Mr Pradhan. He also clarified that the Common University Entrance Test – Undergraduate (CUET-UG) would continue to be held once a year.

In the line of fire over alleged irregularities in NEET and PhD entrance NET, the Centre had in July set up the panel to ensure transparent, smooth and fair conduct of examinations by NTA. The high-level panel headed by former ISRO Chief R Radhakrishnan noted that multi-stage testing for NEET-UG could be a viable possibility that needs to be followed up.

“An acceptable framework with threshholds and test objectives of scoring and ranking at each stage, and number of attempts etc. may be evolved,” the panel has recommended in its report.

The panel noted that the NTA outstretched itself to accommodate diverse requests from many test indenting agencies for handling end-to-end operations of tests. “The NTA should primarily conduct entrance examinations. Enhancing its scope for other examinations may be considered after the capacity of the NTA is augmented,” the panel said in its report.