The re-examination (RE-NEET UG) for the country’s most prestigious and largest medical entrance test, the ‘National Eligibility cum Entrance Test’ (NEET UG), has recently concluded. Both students who sat for the exam and education experts agree this year’s paper was quite difficult.
Experts said while the paper was slightly easier than the one in 2025, it was significantly harder than the paper for the exam held on May 3. As a result, they expected a drop in estimated scores, adding that a perfect score (720 out of 720) is unlikely this time, though they also expected the ‘safe score’ for admission to government colleges to be considerably lower than previous years.
Parijat Mishra, a career counseling expert at a private coaching institute in Kota, said no student appears confident of achieving the perfect score. In fact, he expected the number of students scoring above 700 marks across the country to be fewer than 50.
Mishra said he expected the score for the All India Rank 1 (AIR 1) could hover around 710 marks, while fewer than 200 students would score between 690 and 700. For comparison, in 2025, Mahesh Kumar from Rajasthan emerged as the NEET UG topper with a score of 686 — the highest score in that difficult exam. Although this year’s paper might be considered slightly easier, with the Biology section turning out to be high-scoring has raised expectations that the topper’s score could reach around 710.
Mishra said the first time a student achieved a perfect score was in 2020, by AIR 1 Shoaib Aftab, who was undergoing coaching in Kota. While Akanksha Singh from Delhi also scored 720, she was allotted AIR 2, based on the tie-breaking formula that prioritised age. Aftab benefited as he was older.
Subsequently, three students achieved a perfect score in 2021, two in 2023, and 17 in 2024. In total, 24 students have achieved this feat so far.
Mishra said the National Testing Agency (NTA) should make public the scores for both the NEET-UG held on May 3, and the RE-NEET UG held on June 21. A list should be prepared of students whose scores across both exams show a difference of more than 300 marks, because, said Mishra, a student improving their score by 300 marks within a short span of just one month in such a highly competitive examination appears impossible under normal circumstances. Thereafter, explanations could be sought from these students, he said. This could also be an effective method for identifying students involved in irregularities. Students who scored around 300 in May, and saw a sudden spike in their score in June, should also come under scrutiny, Mishra said.
According to Mishra, the National Testing Agency (NTA), which possesses a variety of data on all students across both tests in May and June, should allow comparison of new and old scores to check for discrepancies. The NTA could then seek clarifications for the discrepancies from the concerned students. “While for some students, fluctuations in scores could stem from other reasons, this would not apply to everyone,” he said.
For General Category students aspiring to study medicine in a government college, Mishra said that in 2025, the final government MBBS seat was allocated at a score of 527 (corresponding to a rank of 26,178). In contrast, the closing score for government medical colleges in 2024 was 652, with a student holding rank 25,220, while in 2023, this was a score of 594 (and a rank of 23,562). Based on this, he felt a score of 550-565 could secure a government MBBS seat this year.
