The Impact of NEET: Part 2

Impact of India's Biggest Exam on Individual Psychology

My first attempt at AIPMT was on 3rd May 2015. It was a sunny Sunday morning and my centre was located in a city about 70km from my place. I had had decent sleep the night before and had stopped studying by 9 at night.

I knew it was important to keep myself calm and prepared for the next 3 hours that were yet to come. I had heard too many stories of students messing up at the final hurdle because they couldn’t keep themselves calm during the exam. My exam was done soon enough.

I had managed to sail through the storm of the exam but apparently, not all of my batchmates did. Some were already talking of taking a drop year, others were still dismayed about what happened inside that exam centre.

For the dissertation in my Master’s programme, I decided to look into the psychological impact that taking a drop year can have on students preparing for NEET. If you are not familiar with the exam, you can read a detailed introduction and historiography of the exam in the previous part of this series here.

Psychological Costs of NEET

I interviewed 5 students who had taken drop year(s) to prepare for the NEET exam. Some had taken 3 drop years, others had taken 2 and one of them was still at the solitary gap year.

The following were some of the themes that came up in our conversations. The list is not exhaustive but should give one a decent idea of the sort of pressures and tribulations a student preparing for the exam has to go through.

Identity and Parents

The age at which students appear for NEET generally lies between 17-20 years old. Psychologically, this time is considered the stage of life when young adults form their own sense of identity, their own thoughts, their own values and their own social groups. It is a time of exploration of the world from which a stable identity is developed.

Students preparing for NEET rarely get the opportunity to explore. They might shift to a new city for studies but the freedom of a new city is quickly replaced by the high-stress environment of a coaching institute. These stressful times naturally make a child question their own decisions.

“Did I do the right thing by coming here?” “Am I good enough to thrive in this environment?” “What happens if I fail?”

In times of such introspection, the internalized parent comes through and pushes the students through these questions. “My parents have done so much for me, I can repay them by studying just a little bit more.”

“If my parents come to know that I am thinking like this they would be disappointed. Why waste my time with such thoughts?”

These parents don't live with the students anymore but they clearly occupy a majority of the space in these kids’ psychological space. For them, their parents are their identity. Are these students living the lives they want or the ones they think would satisfy their parents the most? We may never truly know.

As the drop years pile up, the identification with the identity of being a doctor becomes even stronger. The students feel like they have already given too much time to this dream of being a doctor and now it is more important than ever to make the dream come true. The sunk cost raises the psychological costs even more which then reduces the chances of optimal performance in the exam and the cycle continues.

Society, Friends and Self

The students dropping for NEET suffer from many issues of their identity but the strongest emotion that resonated across all my participants was the feeling of being left behind. They would tell me about their friends who had gotten a college in their earlier attempts and how they had moved up the ladder of our education system while these participants remained stuck on the same rung.

Slowly, the feeling of being left behind reduced the quality of conversation with old friends. Friends were lost, isolation set in, and loneliness was not that far away.

Parents continued to support the students in their education but doubts would be raised about the sincerity of these students and their studying habits. Leisurely time was as rare as a unicorn because time spent relaxing is time spent not studying and for the parents, lack of study time is a recipe for failure, again.

Living in such an environment at home, or outside, meant that social interactions became more awkward for the participants. They would be asked by elders about what they are doing right now, only to be sheepishly told they are droppers. Society doesn’t look too well on droppers. They are considered people who already failed once.

Now imagine doing that for three years. Self-doubt, frustration, self-hate, resentment towards the world and so much more are a part of just another day in the life of a student taking a drop year. Despite all these psychological battles, these students still prepare, still study for the sake of that dream, that hope that they will get to wear the white coat someday.

Do I respect them for their dedication or discard it as a product of a problematic idolization of the profession of medicine?

Thankfully, it is not my decision to make.

What I can say with some certainty is that the psychological costs associated with taking a drop year and quite high and rarely factored into the decision-making process.

I have a gap of two years in my own career as well and even today, even after 5 years, I still feel like I am behind my batchmates, that I still have something to prove.

I left those places and that time behind me, but I still carry it within myself today. As do lakhs of other students who take drop years to prepare for this one exam, and the lakhs that will continue to do so in the future as well.

NEET is not simply an exam in modern India. It is an annual cultural phenomenon, one that has costs beyond economics and finances.

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And that is it! Wow this NEET series took quite a lot out of me. Personal experiences, research experiences and so much more went into the last two articles. I hope you liked it and if you appeared for the exam at some point in your life, I could hit some of those experiences. Let me know what you thought in the comments or by replying to this email!

I will be looking forward to your views.

Until next time,

Arjun

🛣🖋🎯