Before NEET, CMC Vellore’s unique MBBS admissions tested aptitude along with merit; paper-leak restarts debate

CMC Vellore MBBS Admissions 2026: What if medical admissions were not based on just one exam but a process that took into account aptitude for the medical profession and commitment to serve the underprivileged population of the country? Before the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET UG) replaced it, the Christian Medical College (CMC) Vellore, one of the top medical colleges in India, had such a system.

With the NEET UG 2026 in a paper-leak crisis and the union government scrambling to fix it with a re-NEET in late June , opponents of a singular nationwide entrance test have pointed to CMC Vellore’s system as more appropriate for medical education.

A prominent private Christian-minority healthcare institute in Tamil Nadu, CMC Vellore had fought for decades to preserve its unique admission process, which put as much emphasis on the candidates’ scholastic knowledge of science as on their suitability for the profession and especially for what India needs from its doctors .

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While the medical college’s opposition to the NEET exam was firmly rooted in the constitutional principle of minority institutes’ right to administer their own affairs, it had also sought to contrast the demonstrable success of its more holistic and mission-focused MBBS admission process with the narrow idea of merit proposed through the NEET framework.

CMC Vellore’s decades-long fight

CMC Vellore, which has been following this admission process since 1948, has fought for almost three decades to maintain its system. Before tangling with the centre, it had successfully resisted the Tamil Nadu government’s attempts, beginning in 1993, to bring the institute under the state’s centralised admission mechanism through a series of interim orders from the Supreme Court (SC).

While an apex court bench, led by the then Chief Justice Altamas Kabir, in 2013, had sided with CMC Vellore and other petitioners in barring the erstwhile Medical Council of India (MCI) from conducting NEET, the decision was overturned in 2016. As CMC continued to hold out against NEET , SC finally ruled in 2020 that the institute would have to abide by the national test. Two years later, it also fixed a new seat-sharing formula between the college and the state, where each would get to fill half the MBBS spots. Until then, CMC had allotted 84 out of 100 UG seats to candidates referred by churches around the country.

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Tamil Nadu opposes NEET as well and successive governments in the state, including the newly-elected one, have taken that stance.

CMC Vellore admission process vs NEET UG

CMC Vellore followed a two-tiered admission process. In the first phase, candidates sponsored by 53 Christian churches and church organisations, belonging to Protestant and Orthodox traditions, many of which run hospitals around the country, were made to write an all-India entrance examination. A certain number of students were then selected from each of the states and called for an elaborate residential interview at the college.

Over a few days, these candidates were made to go through a series of tasks and interactions, aimed at assessing their personality, character, communication skills, leadership qualities, suitability for the gruelling medical education and willingness to serve in rural communities. The activities, which ranged from solving a crossword puzzle to organising a small event, gauged everything from manual dexterity to teamwork abilities.

This exercise was allotted around 30-40% of the weightage in the overall evaluation. The final selection was in a round-robin manner to ensure equal representation of candidates from different parts of the country.

CMC Vellore MBBS grads in rural areas

According to Sunil Chandy, who was director of CMC between 2012 and 2017 and was part of CMC for 25 years, this system of “distributed justice” was designed to ensure that everyone had a fair shot at the selection. “This method ensures that a tribal boy from a rural school in Jharkhand, competing against a South Delhi boy from a top school, is also selected,” he said.

One of the key arguments CMC made in the court was that its time-tested model produced doctors who stayed in the country and practised in the hinterland , rather than moving abroad in pursuit of a better lifestyle.

It presented the findings of a survey conducted in 1992 showing that around 80% of the college’s alumni worked in India for more than 10 years after their graduation, with the majority stationed in non-metropolitan areas.

“This evaluation remained the same, even during surveys conducted in 2002 and 2010, and is in striking contrast to similar surveys carried out by other medical institutions of equal standard, where only a small number of graduates have been working in non-metropolitan areas,” the 2013 SC order records CMC Vellore’s counsel as saying.

Chandy said that this was a direct result of the institute’s admission process. “Someone who gets in by the present system of marks alone has no moral obligation to anybody. They would say they got in on their own merit and had five colleges to choose from, so the institute should be happy they joined it. And therefore, after they finish MBBS, their aim in life would be to write the USMLE [United States Medical Licensing Exam] and jump out of India because the conditions here are not favourable,” he said.

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Medicine requires ‘more than academics’

CMC buttressed its argument by holding up its reputation and standing in the medical education space.The medical college’s counsel highlighted that CMC was rated among the top ten medical colleges in the country and usually ranked first or second. “The excellence of patient care and academic training has been recognised, both at the national and international levels, and its contribution to health research has also been recognised as pioneering work by both national and international research funding agencies,” the counsel argued in the court.

SC’s 2013 order had endorsed this view, as CMC’s experience became a key ground in the apex court’s decision to cancel NEET.

“The practice of medicine entails something more than brilliance in academics, it requires a certain commitment to serve humanity. India has brilliant doctors of great merit, who are located mostly in urban areas and whose availability in a crisis is quite uncertain. What is required to provide health care to the general masses and particularly those in the rural areas, are committed physicians who are on hand to respond to a crisis situation,” said the court.

While the centre had sought to argue that the institute’s reliance on the church organisation for the initial selection of candidates was against the concept of recognition of merit, SC rejected it. The court observed that there was nothing on record to suggest that CMC and other minority institutes had indulged in any malpractice in matters of student admission.

NTA NEET UG favours ‘rich and urban’

Chandy said that NEET has not only failed in achieving its stated objective of bringing more equity, curbing capitation fees in medical education and avoiding multiplicity of exams, but also made the situation worse than it was before. “This national one bucket, strictly-by-merit concept that the courts in their wisdom approved, is only allowing the rich and urban to enter, and pushing out the distant and the marginalised from the competition,” he said.

He also points out that NEET has failed to reign in the ever-rising cost of medical education . “Capitation fees have become three times more distressing than what it was before NEET,” he said.

Another drawback of the national test, according to Chandy, is that it has trapped the aspirants in a perpetual cycle of exam preparation, distracting them from the actual learning process, be it in school or college. “NEET is not one but three exams - one each at UG, PG and superspecialty level. “Because marks alone is the criteria, the students are no longer interested in going to the wards or seeing the patients, as they are busy going to coaching to prepare to crack NEET PG ,” he said.

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Chandy advocates a return to the decentralised admission system, not the least because of NEET's mammoth scale, and even scrapping the entrance tests altogether. “There will be corruption because NEET coaching centers are very, very powerful,” he said.

“Are we training doctors to go for the rest of the world? Or are we training them to serve our poor people who are in the villages, which are in an appalling state today. This is a fundamental question, a philosophical question, that the government must ask and be humble enough to say, ‘We made a mistake’,” he added.

The NEET UG 2026 was conducted on May 3 but has been cancelled due to a paper leak. The National Testing Agency is holding a re-exam on June 21, 2026.