New Delhi: The National Board of Examinations (NBE) has decided not to lower the passing standards for foreign medical graduates (FMGs), emphasizing that “qualifying standards cannot be diluted.” In contrast, the qualifying cut-off for NEET PG, the centralized entrance exam for Indian medical graduates, has been significantly reduced over the last five years.
In NEET PG, students must achieve a certain percentile to qualify. For FMGE, however, the requirement is a clear 50% score. Traditionally, the NEET PG cut-off for general candidates started at the 50th percentile, roughly equivalent to about 35% of the total marks, while for reserved category candidates, it began at the 40th percentile, or around 30%.
To ensure that more seats are filled, the cut-off has been lowered annually, dropping to a worrying zero percentile in 2023 for all categories, allowing even those with negative scores to appear as qualified. In 2024, the cut-off was raised slightly to 5th percentile, though the exact percentage scores remained unclear due to a lack of published data.
If the passing mark for NEET PG were to remain at 50%, it’s estimated that only about 25% of candidates who took the exam in the past five years would have qualified. The proposed National Exit Test (NExT), which aims to standardize the licensing and entrance exam for both FMGs and Indian graduates, has also been postponed indefinitely.
The NBE pointed out that the FMG screening test is designed to ensure that international graduates can practice in India while the NEET PG exam is intended to rank Indian graduates who have already completed their MBBS degree. It should be noted that final year exams for MBBS students are conducted in their own colleges, where there may be an inherent bias to improve pass rates.
First introduced in 2002, the FMGE was created to align the standards of doctors trained abroad with those trained in India. This regulation also requires FMGs to complete a one-year internship from an accredited institution after passing the FMGE in order to obtain their practice license.
Recently, the National Medical Commission, which succeeded the old Medical Council of India, has made it compulsory for FMGs to secure a license from the country where they trained before they can attempt the FMGE. While the requirements for FMGs have tightened over the years, the same cannot be said for medical education in India, where the criteria for opening new medical colleges and the quality of education seem to have been relaxed.
Since 2014, the total number of medical colleges in India has surged from 387 to 818, and the number of MBBS seats has increased from over 51,000 to roughly 130,000. However, many of these institutions face criticism for inadequate faculty, infrastructure, and patient exposure.
Despite NEET PG candidates being required to pass their MBBS with at least 40% in each subject and an overall score of 50%, reports of candidates scoring only a handful of marks—or even negative scores—highlight concerns about the quality of education in medical colleges across the country. This situation has raised the question of whether India should maintain different standards for assessing FMGs compared to its own medical graduates, given the significant disparities in educational quality.
