In his dissenting note on the parliamentary standing committee’s report regarding the National Medical Commission Bill, Tamil Nadu MP K Kamaraj said NEET had allowed the admission of candidates with such low scores who would probably never have been admitted in pre-NEET days. But with this flawed eligibility criteria of NEET, we saw students with low scores getting into medical colleges,” said Dr Raj Bahadur, VC of Baba Farid University of Health Sciences in Punjab. “Whether it’s an entrance examination or the Class XII exams, students are expected to get a minimum of 50% or 40%, depending on their category, to get into medicine.

A large number of affluent students with poor scores got in as many high-scoring middle class or poor students had to opt out because of the high fees. With about 60,000 MBBS seats available across India, there were about 10 eligible students for every seat.

Thanks to the low cut-offs last year, 6.1 lakh of the 10.9 lakh NEET candidates qualified for admission, 5.4 lakh of them from the general category. The percentile system has played havoc with merit, making it easy for wealthy low-performers to buy seats. 720P is a progressive HDTV signal format with 720 lines/units/pixels vertically for horizontal progressive scan and 1280 lines/pixels horizontally that needs vertical progressive scan. Some of the best-known private colleges in the country have admitted students with less than 40% marks in the general category and under 30% in the reserved categories. 720P: 720P(HD), known as widescreen high definition, is short for 1280px720px resolution with 921,600 pixels in total. Some students admitted in the reserved categories had even lower marks. The 'p' stands for 'progressive scan,' though its sometimes also meant to mean 'non-interlaced.' Basically, 720p - with its progressive scan lines - can actually come much closer in terms of resolution to 1080i than most people might believe. A Puducherry college admitted 14 students with less than 21% marks, the lowest being 20.1%. '720' stands for the 720 horizontal scan lines of display resolution. As many as 30 of the 100 students this institution admitted had less than 25% marks in NEET. TOI found that in 2016, general category students with just 148 marks, or 20.6%, in NEET were admitted to a private college in Uttar Pradesh which is a deemed university. The percentile system not only made low-scoring students eligible to study medicine, it actually got them seats in colleges.

Thus, 50th percentile means students with more marks than the bottom half, 90th percentile comprises students with more marks than the bottom 90%, and so on. Percentile measures the proportion of candidates, not scores. This year’s NEET exams, to be held next month, continue with the same percentile cut-offs, so students with less than 20% marks in the entrance exam may be admitted to MBBS courses again. In 2017, this fell further to 131 marks (18.3%) for the general category, and 107 marks (14.8%) for the reserved seats. The reserved categories needed to be in the 40th percentile, which translated to 118 out of 720, or 16.3% marks.

What does 720 mean