The Union HRD Ministry has dropped its ambitious plan to conduct the NEET medical and dental entrance exam twice a year and in online mode only following Health Ministry's recommendations, a senior official said on Tuesday.
The registration process for next year’s NEET exam, NEET 2019, will now begin from November 1st, 2018 and the exam will be held on May 5th, 2019. However, this decision does not affect the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), which will be held twice a year. The newly formed National Testing Agency (NTA) will conduct national-level entrance examinations — NET, NEET, JEE (Mains) — which were previously organised by the CBSE.
Earlier, the health Ministry wrote to the HRD Ministry, raising concerns about conducting NEET twice a year as the examination calendar may put additional pressure on students.
Last month, Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar had announced that the newly-formed National Testing Agency (NTA) would conduct the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test, along with the Joint Entrance Examination-Main for admission to engineering colleges, twice a year.
The Health Ministry, it’s understood was worried that holding it online would alienate poor students from rural areas and penalise economically poor families and give an advantage to students from urban areas.
This is why the exam will be held by pen and paper.
"The change in the NEET exam pattern as against the statement earlier, which will now be a single exam in pen-and-paper mode and in the same number of languages as has been conducted last year, is on the request of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, which wanted the same pattern followed last year to be maintained," the official said.
Subsequent to the tentative schedule released by the ministry last month, the HRD Ministry today made public the final schedule of examinations to be conducted by NTA till May, 2019.
NEET will be conducted on May 5, 2019.
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