Medical coaching: Claims and hopes

How do 400 students occupy 285 seats? It requires ingenuity on the part of medical coaching institutes in Delhi to achieve this magic. A simple addition of the number of students selected in DPMT from just six leading coaching institutes totals 400. This when even the most obscure of institutes claims that their students are in! So the tally of `claims’ is actually, even higher.

"My father, while waiting outside the hall where I was sitting for the CBSE mains paper, noticed someone from a coaching institute handing out free practise papers. He had to fill a form for the free material in return. The shock came when I found my name on the list of selected candidates for the same institute," said Shalini Chowdhary, a third-year medical student at Calcutta Medical College. "I never believed in joining coaching institutes. They load students with unnecessary information and set a pace that's hard to keep up with," she added.

If you are a medical aspirant from Delhi, there are at least four entrances you will be taking for that prestigious medical degree — DPMT, CBSE, AIIMS and VMMC. But there are at least 15 entrance exams for the various coaching centres that have mushroomed in the city. And if you do not get the institute of your choice in the first batch, then you can always hope to be in the 23rd or the 24th batch — all you need to do is keep re-appearing in the re-examinations.

Which of the 15 coaching centres do you join? A challenge, considering that none of the institutes are willing to give their success rates in absolute percentages. "At an all-India level approximately 35-40% of our students get selected into medical colleges," says Soma Mukherjee, counsellor at Aakash Institute, Janakpuri. As to the percentage success rate in DPMT or CBSE she says, "No comments." All the leading institutes take a similar 'no comment' stand when it comes to percentage success. It is interesting to note how they refuse to reveal the number of students enrolled in their institutes.

There is no denying that these institutes provide a competitive environment and the faculty can help to clear your doubts. But the depth of content is so vast, and the pace so quick, that it requires brilliance to remain in-sync. The irony is that if you have the potential to be in-sync, you don't need their inputs in the first place. An above average student might actually be better off without these institutes and a brilliant student would do well without them anyway.

On the other hand, the scenario for students from non-medical stream is better. With a large number of seats available to them, even an average student can hope to get into a good engineering college. Besides, now most engineering colleges are adopting paper patterns based on the CBSE curriculum.