As NEET nears, confusion among students and parents continues to be on the rise, especially after the debacle last year. The students are more concerned about getting all the rules and regulations right so that they won't have to cut off their sleeves or remove all their jewelery or stress about getting documents at the last minute. All this happened last year.
This year, however, what is really stressing out students in Tamil Nadu is the confusion over their surnames. Most students down South use initials for surnames, which is not often the case up North and students in Tamil Nadu are running pillar to post to try to change their names on all their documents, "All my documents from my birth certificate to my transfer certificate only have my initial, but now I'm trying to get the name changed on my Aadhar card," said a student.
In Tiruchy, there are a total of 20 E-Seva centres, where none centres are undertaken by ELCOT and 11 are under TACTV. On a regular day, a centre has between 30-4people students who come for enquiries and half of them are students wanting to change their surnames.
A popular coaching centre for NEET in the city has instructed all its students to modify their names in the Aadhar to avoid any confusion. A parent of a student said, “The steps in filing the NEET application consumes a lot of time as it needs to be very careful completed as it affects the examination process.”
R V S Muralidhar, managing director of a city coaching centre said that the students are so anxious that they are taking all sorts of precautions possible to avoid any unforeseen circumstances that will impact their performance. After there was controversy over the fact that the Tamil medium paper was tougher than the English medium paper, students are also wondering how things will be conducted this time.
During previous year NEET in Tamil Nadu, the question paper for English medium students did not include Tamil Language and the question paper was set tough for the Tamil medium students. “If English is selected as the preferred language to write the exam, will the question paper be in English, Tamil or English, Hindi?" Muralidhar questioned.
The NEET application form was made available online since February 8 and the last date to submit the application is March 9. The exam in Tamil Nadu will be held on May 6.
