The National Eligibility and Entrance Test (NEET) 2020 for admission into undergraduate medical courses across India will be held on May 3, 2020. The results of the exam will be declared on June 4, 2020.
The National Testing Agency (NTA), the body responsible for conducting NEET exams, issued the notification on Monday on its website. As per the notification, NEET (UG) will be the admission criteria to study undergraduate medical courses like MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery) even in colleges such as AIIMS and JIPMER.
“NEET (UG) – 2020 shall be conducted in 11 languages, including English and Hindi,” reads the notification. The students registering for NEET (UG) 2020 can opt to take the examination in one of the eleven languages specified in the website — English, Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Odia, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
Important dates
Date of Exam — May 3, 2020
Exam timings — 2 pm to 5 pm
Date of application — December 2, 2019 to 11.50 pm on December 31, 2019
Issue of admit card — March 27, 2020 onwards
Results — June 4, 2020
The examination fee for students from the General or Unreserved category is Rs 1,500 while students under the Economically Weaker Section (EWS) quota and those from Other Backward Class non-creamy layer (OBC-NCL) category will have to pay Rs 1,400 when applying for NEET 2020.
The fees for students under the Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes/Persons with Disabilities and Transgender Persons category will have to pay Rs 800 for registration. For more information about the eligibility criteria and syllabus, candidates can go through the information brochure available on the website.
The national-level entrance exam has been embroiled in controversies in Tamil Nadu for the past few years. In September 2017, Anitha, a Dalit student from Tamil Nadu killed herself after being dejected of not securing good NEET scores despite being among the toppers in her school.
The government of Tamil Nadu had secured an exemption from NEET that year, however, the stance was reversed by the Supreme Court in August 2017. The court had ordered the Tamil Nadu government to conduct medical admissions only based on NEET score, which led Anitha to lose hope on her dreams to pursue medicine.
The NEET (UG) 2018 question paper in Tamil created controversy after candidates alleged that there were translation errors in it and approached the Madras High Court to award them grace marks for 49 questions, which were wrongly translated in Tamil.
The Madras High Court then accepted the plea of the students and awarded 196 marks to each student who had opted to write the exam in Tamil. However, the Supreme Court stepped in and set aside the High Court order, stating that in case of doubts, the students could have simply referred to the English version of the questions for more clarity.
In 2019, around six students and their parents were arrested for being a part of a NEET impersonation scandal that broke out in Tamil Nadu after the Dean of Theni Medical College conducted an internal verification of the documents submitted by first-year MBBS students.