NEW DELHI: “Frankly speaking, I am a little scared,” admitted Murchana Ray, a fourth-year student of medicine at Assam Medical College, Dibrugarh. Getting into medical college was difficult enough but now, she has the prospect of having to write yet another examination to earn her degree hanging over her head.

Ray may be one of the students to write the National Exit Test (NEXT) for medicine for the first time.

A centralized common exam for all graduating students of medicine will decide if they can be declared a qualified MBBS doctor, allowed to practice or join a postgraduate programme in medicine. The NEXT will eventually replace entrance tests for postgraduate programmes.

The law enacted to replace the Medi-cal Council of India (MCI) with the National Medical Commission (NMC) also provides for the NEXT. The NMC was established at the end of September and is now responsible for regulating medical education.

According to reports and also students and teachers, the first exit exam will be held in 2022 and the batch that joined in 2017 will be the first to appear for it. But there is no certainty yet and that is making students anxious.

“When do we prepare?” asked Ray. Some also said that the launch date for the exam should be announced at least a few years in advance.

NEXT and its design

“NEXT 1 will be a computer-based exam comprising MCQ or Multiple Choice Questions,” said Shubham Anand, a final-year MBBS student at GS Medical College and Hospital in Hapur, Uttar Pradesh.

Anand was part of a 30-member student delegation that participated in a meeting with the Board of Governors of the erstwhile MCI in February. The meeting was held for sensitizing students and deciding on NEXT.

“The meeting was announced quite suddenly as there were a lot of protests and we were confused. We kept asking V K Paul Sir, whom we’d meet on campus, about NEXT, so he called a meeting to clear the doubts,” said Mukul Kumar, final-year MBBS student at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) New Delhi.

According to the plan shared with students, the exit exam will be in two parts.

Students will likely appear for NEXT 1 within 15 days or a month of completing their final fourth-year exams. Those who pass will intern for the next 10 months. Meanwhile, their scores will be locked. Those who do not pass will have to repeat the next year.

After completing the ten-month internship, students will appear for NEXT 2. This will include various components, some computer-based, some practical based on their internships, and viva-voce.

“The NEXT will involve questions from both lower and higher domains of knowledge...This is required to differentiate between meritorious students from others. And then there will be analytical questions,” said Sandip Mukherjee, professor, Burdwan Medical College, West Bengal.

Students unsure

“If they [NMC] have decided that the 2017 batch will have to face NEXT exam, then ideally they should have been informed two to three years before,” said Anand. The NEXT 1 is likely to cover the syllabus of all five years of MBBS.

“I will not get the time to prepare,” said Sripriya Xenian, a third-year MBBS student studying in Bangalore Medical College and Research Institute.

Undergraduate students studying medicine are being victimized, felt Debarnab Dey, a final-year student of Silchar Medical College, Assam. “Previously, the students got time to prepare for NEET PG [the entrance test for postgraduate courses]. But now, NEXT is for getting the MBBS degree and…also an entrance exam for post-graduate programmes,” he said.

Why NEXT

Medical educationists, however, believe that a test like NEXT was needed to standardize medical education.

“If I get a similar standard of education in Punjab, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, there is no problem. So, this will be helpful because education will be streamlined towards one direction,” said Mukherjee.

The NEXT exam will also address the problem of many students sitting out their internships or not joining practice because they are too busy attending coaching classes for NEET PG.

“What usually happened during that one year of internship is that no one took the internship seriously, but joined coaching institutes preparing for NEET PG as that was their main concern. So, whatever skills a doctor is meant to learn during internship, today’s doctors lack,” added Anand.

“They will be more confident,” said Rakesh Garg, additional professor, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi, explaining how NEXT will help graduates. “They will be able to assess themselves [before] they practice.”

The preparation for bringing in transparency and equivalence in the cur-riculum and innovative teaching had started in 2019.

New curriculum and NEXT

The MBBS curriculum was revsied by the erstwhile Medical Council of India (MCI) last year. Titled “Competency-based UG Curriculum for the Indian Medical Graduates”, the new curriculum was rolled out from August, 2019.

“There is need for some uniformity because, in India, other than the premier medical colleges both private and public, there are also many peripheral ones. Students of these peripheral medical colleges are deprived of quality training and they do not get the required attention,” added Mukherjee. The NEXT will bring in standardisation, he believes. “This is something which was much required and if it has finally been introduced so many years after Independence, it should be lauded.”

Mukherjee says that the present curriculum is geared toward inculcating a problem-solving behaviour. The “new curriculum is taking care of three most important aspects that a doctor needs – first is knowledge, second is skill, and the third is the psycho-motor domain,” he explained.

Emphasizing that scrutiny is important at both ends of medical education, Garg argued that the “NEXT will improve the standards of teaching, training and assessment”. He added: “Bias can also be removed in such standard exams which were previously prevalent. Also, nowadays, there is no more conventional teaching.”

Also Read:

• Medical, paramedical colleges reopen in Karnataka after 9 months
• How IIT Madras’ ‘happiness course’ helps students cope with stress

Write to us at news@careers360.com