Exit exam for MBBS graduates on cards

Aditi Tandon

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, June 21

After rolling out the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) for undergraduate medical admissions this year, the government is mulling an exit exam for MBBS graduates from the next academic session.

The idea is to test MBBS passouts for skills acquired through the course and see if they are good enough to practise at the end of the drill.

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The exit exam proposed from the 2017-18 academic session will be the first-ever exercise mandating MBBS graduates to attain minimum prescribed percentiles to be able to practise medicine. The licence to practise is proposed to be given to only those medical undergraduates who cross the threshold of quality set in terms of marks attained in the exit test.

The catch is — Health Ministry is considering converting the already existing all-India PG medical entrance exam into a three-in-one test which will include the MBBS exit exam. “There will be no additional burden on MBBS students. The objective is to see if the graduate is good enough to practise medicine at the end of his course. We are, however, not proposing a new exam for MBBS exit. The existing all-India PG entrance exam conducted annually around November-end will be used for this purpose. The proposal is to use the PG exam for MBBS exit as also for testing foreign graduates who seek licences to practise in India,” a Health Ministry official said. At present, there is a separate exam (Foreign Graduates Medical Exam) for foreign graduates seeking equivalence to practise medicine in India.

The idea is to do away with this and offer the PG medical entrance exam to foreign graduates as well.

A ministry source says: “The proposal is to have foreign graduates, Persons of Indian Origin and Overseas Citizens of India holding foreign medical degrees to take one test — the all-India PG entrance test — and become eligible to practise in India. One test will thus serve three purposes.”

The ministry’s argument behind using the PG test as the MBBS exit exam is that annually 95 per cent of MBBS passouts anyway take the all-India PG entrance exam. 

“Those who secure a minimum 45 percentile in the PG entrance exam are eligible to apply for PG courses. This criteria can be fixed as the threshold for MBBS exit exam, which means graduates who touch this mark will be eligible to practise medicine,” a ministry official said.