The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), has added 43 new test centres for NEET 2018. Prakash Javedkar tweeted at his page some new changes inferred for the medical entrance exam for the academic year 2018. Last year the examination was held in 107 cities, however, from this year onwards, NEET is going to be held in 150 cities.
The decision to add new test centres has been taken as last year, around 4000 and more candidates applied for the entrance test but at some places, there were no exam centres as it was difficult for students to travel that far. So, the exam centres which were not there in 2017 have been added as centre cities for NEET 2018.
05 new centers have been added in Andhra Pradesh, 02 in Assam, 05 in Gujarat, 06 in Maharashtra, 04 in Odisha, 02 in Tamil Nadu, 05 in Kerala, 02 in Telangana, 03 in West Bengal, 03 in Uttar Pradesh and one new centre each in Chhattisgarh, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab, Karnataka and Uttarakhand.
Also, NEET examination is scheduled to be held on May 6, 2018, in 11 different languages – Hindi, English, Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi, Odiya, Bengali, Assamese, Telugu, Tamil and Kannada. The question format this year will be same in all the languages, which means there will be one set of question paper which will be made available in all the languages to ensure uniformity of difficulty level for all students.
This year various changes have been seen in the NEET 2018 notification, such as, open school and private candidates are not eligible to apply for NEET, Urdu has been added as a new language for NEET question paper, there is no cap on number of attempts, candidates who have studied Biology/Biotechnology as an additional subject at 10+2 level are also not eligible to apply for NEET.
Ever since MCI disbarred Open school and Private candidates from appearing in NEET 2018, the CBSE has come under a lot of heat from students and parents who have been requesting for a rollback of the clause. To this, the CBSE has put a rest to the argument and speculation by stating that it has no role in deciding the eligibility criteria and MCI is solely responsible for it. CBSE as a convenor of the examination merely participates in the capacity of implementing the guidelines set by MCI for the examination.
Many petitions have been filed by the activists to help the open school and all those candidates who have been affected by the eligibility criteria prepared by MCI.
NEET 2018 exam will be based on the common syllabus of NCERT/CBSE & State Board of 11th & 12th class.
The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (UG) is the only gateway examination for admission in MBBS, BDS and AYUSH courses. Till last year, some universities conducted their own entrance test for admission in Ayush Courses, however, from this year onwards, it has been finalised that admission in AYUSH courses will be done on the basis of the merit in NEET 2018.
