NEET: How do you test ethics?

As a trained medical doctor, I feel that I must say something about the recently passed legislation called National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) which will henceforth guide admission in Indian medical colleges.

It replaces the multiple tests conducted by multiple institutions and State governments with widely differing syllabi. Prima facie, this is a great thing as students don't have to study multiple syllabi and appear for multiple exams back to back and some even happening on the same day.  However, there are disadvantages too, as I have discovered by virtue of being associated with the governance of one of the Christian Medical Colleges in the country. The issue with NEET or for that matter the JEE for the IITs is that they test for pure academic merit and nothing else. Academic merit can be accumulated by enrolling in cram centers like Kota whose sole reason for existence is to produce students who can enter those hallowed gates.

However, coming to the Christian Medical Colleges, till the time they were allowed to conduct their own exams they did not only look at academic merit. In keeping with their ethos, they looked for (not always successfully of course) those who had the aptitude to go and serve in rural India, the purpose for which these medical colleges were set up in the first place. There is also another Gandhian philosophy based medical college, which similarly looked for ethics and values in their students and not just marks.

A recent NDTV sting operation brought out the horrendous fact that in Punjab many medical colleges function with the help of hired 'ghost' faculty, private practitioners hired for 2-3 days simply to help get the college its license. Now imagine being treated by doctors who are not qualified, because they went to a college that operated with this kind of faculty. After all, when we seek out a doctor for treatment, we do not typically ask which college and university they passed out from.

In professions like medicine and many others, it is simply not enough to grade a student by how many marks he or she scored. There is such a thing in medicine as the Hippocratic Oath (and equivalent honour codes in other professions).  If we only evaluate students for their academic merit without any look at their motivation, character and ethics, which we subsequently expect them to abide by, then something is surely amiss.