NEETING The Medical Entrance Requirements - Identifying The Best Colleges From The Student's Perspective

I wrote a few days back about NEET and various quotas: AIQ (All India Quota), SQ (State quota) and caste quota.

This post tries to address the following question.

As a MBBS candidate (or her parent) how do we go about identifying the colleges? There are thousands of colleges in India, some government and some private. 

As a parent we want the best medical college for our child to get admission into. Most of us can't afford the pay for the management quota seats and we want our child to get into a college where he learns well and becomes a good doctor and in future...

So maybe we ask our friends about good colleges. We write down the names of great medical colleges such as AIIMS Delhi, CMC Vellore (I have left out mentioning Gypmer in this post because I am not sure how to spell it). The total number of seats in these colleges is about 500. Not all of those seats are UR (= Unreserved). And about 175,000 students are looking for medical seats in India. So where does that leave each of us?

Now if you / your child are a genius and get NEET All India Rank 10, you do not need this post. You read this link instead that a friend of mine sent me: http://www.theweek.in/theweek/cover/indias-best-colleges.html (go through the list of top medical colleges in the link). 

But if you are a bright student or are the parent of a bright child whose NEET AIR is perhaps around 5000 then this post will help you. If you / your child is likely to get AIR 12000, this post may still be of help to you. But you may need to shortlist more colleges than I have done. English Grammar aficionados can find out whether the verb that follows "if you/your child" should be is OR are.

What led to this exercise

A friend of mine and I collaborated together towards this exercise. While I may use the first person singular while writing this post, it was she who first made the master list of medical colleges and started evaluating colleges based on a set of parameters. I joined her in this exercise subsequently. I have good amount of prior experience in the medical field as described in the post here.

While looking at Google reviews for colleges or at collegedunia, college360.com sites, we found that the data or opinions were too narrow or too broad and there was no justification for the same. 

For example: A college was rated as follows: Faculty 5.6/10, Placements 4.7/10. How were these arrived at? Or more subjective reviews such as "Superb college, one day I want to become a student there", "I took my brother there and we were treated so efficiently by the doctors there". 

See the data was in either too refined a form or in such crude form - it made us uncomfortable.

What bothered us was also the fact that AIIMS (non Delhi) campuses consistently were rated "not high" by their own students. So the question we had was - what caused this "low" rating. We googled and got hold of a list of all candidates who got admission to all AIIMS colleges couple of years back. We started to ping some of them randomly and we connected to a couple of students through networking sites and chatted with them to get the insider information. There was also a report few months back in a leading daily about how an MBBS student from one of the newer AIIMS colleges felt bad about not getting adequate clinical experience. 

And we found in 2 separate cases that the students' exposure to patients was limited in the new AIIMS colleges (Rishikesh, Bhopal etc). And hence this, adequate exposure to patients, became a crucial requirement for shortlisting colleges. 

So we found ourselves facing the question: how could we identify the appropriate medical college for us / our children? If we had an all India ranking of all medical colleges based on an appropriate set of parameters, this post would have been unnecessary.

How the colleges were selected:

What we did was for a student from TN state. For students from other states the spreadsheet would be very similar - just change the candidate state from Tamil Nadu to the appropriate state in the spreadsheet. I often mention a spreadsheet in this post. Yes it exists and no, it is not public yet. 

Only Government colleges were considered because they are definitely cheaper and often better than private colleges. A total of about 90 colleges were selected. Which were those? 

• The best colleges such as AIIMS Delhi, CMC etc 
• The new AIIMS colleges such as Bhopal. Bhuvaneswar etc
• Colleges in domiciled state (in this example Tamil Nadu) - since 85% of the seats would be available for domiciled students (subject of course to various caste quotas), a good number of govt colleges in the state were listed down. 
• States were identified and rejected. AP, Telengana and JK were rejected because there is no All India Quota (AIQ) in these states. North eastern states, Haryana, Bihar, UP were rejected by me for other reasons - we didn't consider colleges from those states. Thank god, we are not rejecting women or handicapped people in such an arbitrary fashion in this post. Otherwise I would have to answer to feminists and handicappists and what not. Government colleges were thus identified from other states.

Thus the list of prospective colleges was formed from the point of view of an UR Tamil Nadu student.

And the focus was on male candidates. Hence Lady Hardinge College Delhi, being a college only for girls, was eliminated. And in AFMC only the male student quota was taken. For female candidates these would need to be tailored.

Getting the list of colleges was the easy job. On what basis do we shortlist the colleges - with special focus on the non-best and non-highly branded colleges?

Next we identified list of parameters to be collected for each college. 

As we started collecting data and analyzing we identified more parameters and collected data for those as well. These are the column headings in the spreadsheet. The data collected had to follow these rules:

• Data for parameters chosen should be available for each college in the public domain - hopefully recent data.
• Data for parameters should be meaningful.

What do we mean by meaningful? Meaningful data should help us with the decision to accept or reject a college. Data (or secondary data, typically ratios, derived from the data we collected) should be comparable across colleges.The data (or ratios) should help identify issues of inconsistency. For example consider a 1000 bed hospital having 100 deaths yearly (not including DOA cases). It is inconsistent because a 1000 bed hospital would have many more deaths than 100 in a year. 

The data we collected could also be inconsistent within a college and also across colleges for the same column (=parameter) because they were obtained on different dates (assessment pdf's made on different dates for the same college by the same or, as is more likely, by different assessors ). This would often be the case since all required data may not have been present in the latest pdf. Also, different assessors could also have brought in their own personal idiosyncrasies.

All data were obtained from internet and more than 95% of data from site: mciindia.org

Another friend who is a doctor provided some suggestions (she mentioned that even formal assessments could be tainted or incorrect - some colleges tend to organize additional beds or even doctors on the assessment date to fudge data much like in Munnabhai MBBS). Nevertheless I based my analysis on the assessment reports - I decided that those assessment reports were the most trustworthy than any other reviews I could lay my hands on. I am neither able to hack into the hospital sites nor do I have access to cabinet ministers. I am just a common man.

Based on these factors:

• The top colleges across India were tagged as best. There was no point analyzing those colleges. Data collection, analysis were not done for these colleges.
• Next came the new AIIMS colleges (Bhopal, Jodhpur etc) which were branded but being too new were not that good as colleges. Admissions into OPD were low for example. Data collection was not done much for these colleges - actually not much data was available anyway for these colleges. 
• Some colleges were rejected straightaway. These were tagged as "No". Opinions were entered in Remarks column in the spreadsheet as to why a college was rejected (or pushed to Yes-2, see next line)
• Some colleges were borderline yet accepted. These were tagged as Yes-2.
• Rest were accepted and tagged as Yes (meaning the college was a good choice). All that remained was whether a student got adequate marks to get selected into that college.

While categorizing colleges as Yes, Yes-2 and No there was some amount of trial and error. The process was a little subjective. Eliminating old (established in 1950s and 60s) colleges took some time to digest especially while at the same time accepting colleges established after the year 2000. We were uncomfortable shortlisting (tagging with Yes) any college established after 2010. We did select a few, we have mentioned the reason why in the spreadsheet.

Factors we considered to be important were:

• Number of outpatients daily in the entire hospital
• No. of beds (Supported by no. of surgeries, deaths, blood units consumed, X ray and CT scans per day). Low number of deaths probably means serious cases don't come to this hospital. Higher number of deaths preferred. For example if only patients with a cough come to a hospital then it's death rate is likely to be low. But do we want to get trained in such a hospital? 
• Level of Faculty Shortage
• Whether the college had Computerized Record Keeping
• Issues highlighted in MCI INDIA Assessment reports
• PG Intake per year (higher the better). If there were more PG students there would be more experienced teachers, the college would have more resources and better information exchange through senior-junior student interaction.

What did we achieve at the end: (note these are approximate figures and can go up or down based on the trial and error)

Of the 86 colleges identified totally, leaving the Best ones and all the AIIMS colleges out, we have shortlisted 30 colleges across India which together have a total seat of 594 available for a student from TN (applying 85% to TN colleges, 15% to other state college seats and also applying UnReserved quota percentages on top). We have further shortlisted another set of 16 colleges across India with total 237 seats available (with the same AIQ/SQ/UR percentages applied).

From the total 46 (=30+16) short listed colleges:

• Of the 594 Yes seats all over India, 302 were in TN and the rest were in other states.
• Of the 237 seats in Yes-2 all over India, 78 were in Tamil Nadu and the rest were outside.

While the Best, Branded and Yes colleges may be the Dream college for a prospective student, it is important to have a contingency plan. The Yes-2 colleges provide that Plan B. In our shortlist there are 13 Yes-2 colleges outside India and 3 within TN. 

Of course if CBSE's NEET exam do not form the basis for MBBS seat allotment, then the analysis of AIQ, SQ etc may not be current. The 85%, 15% allocation of seats may change as well as the basis on which students get admitted to a college. I wonder whether even the list of 46 short listed colleges would undergo a change in that case.

The detailed spreadsheet for public use is planned to be uploaded after a month. The links here and here are for beta testers.

In the next post, I have estimated the AIR and percentile for a student who got 600 marks out of 700 in NEET

Additional reading:
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/lessons-from-a-fiasco/article19547540.ece.