Thiruvananthapuram: The students who aspire to pursue MBBS or BDS abroad will be given a no-objection certificate by the Medical Council of India only if they have cleared the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET UG 2018).
Every year, 6,000 to 7,000 students from the country go aboard mostly to Russia and China to pursue MBBS and BDS courses. Out of them, around 2,000 students are from the state. The Central Board of Secondary Education has issued a notification on NEET 2018 saying that the decision was on the basis of a recommendation of the ministry of health.
Former joint commissioner for entrance examinations Rajoo Krishnan told Deccan Chronicle that it was difficult for the health ministry to ensure that students who did not clear NEET are not admitted to foreign universities. However, it can make a provision that only the medical graduates who have cleared the NEET are allowed to write Foreign Medical Graduate Examination (FMGE) needed for practising in the country, said Mr Krishnan.
The notification also barred students passing out of open schools from taking the test as they pursued education in the correspondence mode. The students who passed out of the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) will not be able to take the NEET to be conducted by the CBSE on May 6. The proposal is aimed at preventing mediocre medical aspirants from getting a degree from foreign medical colleges merely by paying huge amounts of money. Most of these students do not pass the test required to practise in the country.
In the last five years, the percentage of foreign medical graduates who have cleared the FMGE was very low and ranged from 13.09 per cent to 26.9 per cent. The absence of entrance tests in foreign medical institutions is also a key factor for the poor performance by such medical graduates in screening tests.
