Saturday, October 6, 2012

NEET PG 2012 registration and the related Chaos

               


For any one who is not aware what this NEET PG means is its a nation wide PG entrance exam in India for Medicos introduced in 2012 and there had been some chaos related to its registration, on which on share my views here.


Being a life deciding factor for medicos I could see a lot of frustration in this front. I too have  registered NEET for my medico friends. It is a concern and I lack knowledge to comment on the time of notice for the exam or quota or syllabi as I am a non - medico by profession.

But I wish to share what could be the other side of the story or a broader picture of this NEET scenario, a couple of things on technical aspects related to computers as a 3rd person. No offense meant nor I support to any one.Sorry for making it lengthy.



Why is it a Computer Based Test and not on papers as usual?


Being one of the important exam and a high population of more than lakh people writing every year which increases every time, the old paper-ledger methods don’t work. There needs more human effort and cost in transport of exam papers, where comes the SECURITY of exam data and the most important evaluation. Its highly error prone and time consuming at a large scale. 


Thus at any point of time moving to a computer based test (CBT) becomes default. A machine dedicated to evaluate your results would not  commit any error unless there is intended human manipulation. And if in case there is a question on security in a CBT, if designed properly, the exam question would be distributed to you only at the moment you sit for the exam from a digitally secure single centralised server where we have more control on handling questions .


Why is the exam conducted across multiple days and not just on a single day?


Setting up a CBT for a lakh people  is a huge cost and task again. It is not just booking a school or college in a city to make the candidates sit with paper in any class room. It needs secure computers networked to connect with the centralized exam question server.


You could see all the venues are engineering colleges this time. The reason is only engineering colleges have 200-300 computers in a single place  and possibly  good network infrastructure to handle the scenario. 


And it is not possible to book all colleges to make a lakh people sit on same day , monitor them. It needs a very great computer server facility like a IRCTC server or a Google server kind of setup to allow lakhs of people to a single computing machine. Its very high cost consuming process to set up for a single day exam in a year.


Thus a single day test is technically not possible at the moment and so the exam is spread across multiple days.



Reliabilty?

You might be aware that the NEET exam seems to be out sourced to a private organization called Prometric who is a world leader in online exam delivery. Prometric has a clear success story conducting almost all certification exams world wide and some more like USMLE, GRE etc. So possibly this exam should not have any question leakages or any mishap.




The Registration chaos 

The web server could only handle a specified number of users at a time, or else it would load itself and fail to work for none. If this kind of loading is done intentionally it is called as ‘denial of service attack’ in computer hacking terms. 



Though it has been declared as a first come first serve service , there seems to be incremental addition of seats based on registrations which was not announced. It is a mistake. And it is also a fact that they have given dates for online registration till November 12th so which they would not have  expected so much load on the registration server on the very first day itself.


The major cause for such happening is the candidates rush to register themselves to reserve a seat in a centre nearby. There had been 57000 registration requests to the server on a single time which ultimately would cause the system to fail and also its a fact that they have restored the server in an hour which is really a commendable job .



In case if they allow such a thing to happen as CBT in a single day, no doubt you will be writing exam the scenario of NEET registration, waiting for questions to appear to you where the pages will load for ever.



There had been more than 120 intended hacking attempts to bring down the registering server for NEET  itself it seems as per the twitter status of NBE. https://twitter.com/neetpg2012  and all are avoided and protected. 



Its such a secure system, if not, all the registration data would have been circulating in public web collected by hackers.


If  CBT happens on a same day , it would be the same case and  imagine all the question papers circulating public web. It would be awkward than anything. Such things wont happen as it seemed to be planned ahead for a good going. Hope for the best


More or less, major exams across the Globe are CBT and successfully go by this way. 

 Point of contacts :

After all machines are just human creations and they too have only limited  capacity to handle.
It seems due to over loading , the candidate help line IVRS number has also failed and had been restored back .

 
They have given a contact page to resolve issues  and I get to know that they are responding on calls from yesterday.  

Try them.
 http://www.nbe.gov.in/neetpg/contact_us.php 
and also a web mail link in the above page.

Seems they respond well on twitter too, giving live updates of their status and they have mentioned about uploading a practice test soon.
No Panic.
Keep cool and Wish you all the Best!






30 comments:

  1. this madrush was bcoz of the fear first come first served statement. evryone wants the nearby center to save time and mental rush...after all this the most important exam in the life of a medical student. fear increased when server showed unavailability of seats even in first few hours...everyone was scared bcoz they thought they lost a year. now u will say they tweeted more seats will be added...but that was very late, most of the students r unaware of twitter (most of them used internet for few times in their life)...so panicking was expected...all minds are not stable enough. Prometric and NBE tried to implement system like USMLE, candidate choose date and center....but they forgot, the huge difference, USMLE is conducted for almost whole year and these exams were for few days. they did very well in august DNB...they gave dates randomly after students choosing preferd centers, after receiving all forms.
    plz first try to walk into their shoes first

    ReplyDelete
  2. but proved costlier...all India exam fee was thousand bucks n this is almost four times that !!! we kno all CBTs are like dat,..stil it cud b litl less...


    still thumbsup fo NEET ...afteralll good change ..much needed...

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  3. Ya conducting such a exam which is first of this kind in such a large scale is really challanging.n NBE should be congratulated for accepting this challege...

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  4. n these delay in starting practice test...so much confusion created among us...one-liner ??? picture based test???? assertions reasons???

    NEET Shud understand that preprTion for these varies depending on question pattern!!!
    n Shud let out the practice paper out of it's cage soon...

    already it's been preponed by around 2 months..don't create more panic by delaying ...

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  5. Change is inevitable and a positive one...but a prior delivery of voucher shoud have.been there...atleast 2-3 days prior to registrstion .. a clear.notice that step by step more slots will bo appearing was enough to avoid d hungama..rahul

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  6. these NBE people lack even common sense..if u hav to conduct xam for lakh of students..u shud hav plan but seems dey start searching solution only after creating problm..from very first day when advertsmnt publish in newspaper first then it came on nbe site,they show their stupidity..already they giv less time nd rest of time wasted in registring..worst board of country..even primary school manage their xam better than these stupid NBE people.

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  7. Almost all of us know what you stated in your blog, the only thing we don't understand is the lack of transparency. Some people logging in after the noon could complete the registration in minutes when most of the people who managed to log in during the very first hours couldn't finish theirs in 10-12 hours. And there were a million more problems like links going dead, the calender not responding to clicks to name a few. The fact that it is outsourced to a global leader in this business and the applicants paid a fee which was a few times more than previous years should warrant smooth online experience all the more.

    And it was such an ugly sight to see the website down and prometric displaying "we are on scheduled maintenance". No one can defend it, it was a shameful start for NBE and prometric in conducting medical examinations in India.

    Let's see how they normalize the performances, NEET is not GRE nor GMAT. Biological questions are much tougher to normalize.

    ReplyDelete
  8. A comment 4m a Facebook user: "Most likely that the moron who tweets through their twitter handle is the author of this blog..."...Quite justified!

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  9. OF COURSE,HAS NEET PEOPLE PAID U TO SING THEIR SONG OR WHAT,FIRST TRY TO B IN KUR SHOES THEN GIVE OPINIONS,IT IS VERY EASY TO SIT AWAY AND COMMENT. AND FOR THE RECORD,NOT ALL MEDICOS ARE NAIVE THAT THEY DON' HNDERSTAND THE BASICS OF CBT. I MYSELF GAVE THE BITSAT EXAM,A CBT WAY BACK IN 2006,LONG B4 THESE PROMETRIC GUYS CAME AROUND,AND IT WAS A VERY SMOOTH AFFAIR. SO CUT THE CRAP AND IF POSSIBLE KEEP UR STUPID IDEAS TO URSELF

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  10. very well said about the realities of test..but i always get the doubt how different days' exams are compared? nbe tried to explain it in info bulletin but that is clearly un-understandable.can u explain it in simple terms like the way u said all this above??

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  11. I am sorry if someone is offended and I am not here to argue or fight for anyone. so many things were not communicated prior. no way to hide those blunders happened in organizing the registration process which is totally different from the technical implementation. I have seen my friends suffering and tried to express my views.typing all in caps and scolding me doesn't help anyway. People who are knowledgeable or with different ideas can very well go on.

    I accept it would be frustrating and we don't take explanations easily. It is the same case like if u were explaining me some process happening inside my dear one's human body after a trauma. I may not understand at all.

    Only because I tried getting into your shoes, I felt the nervousness of my friends and explaining things here.

    Regarding the half loaded calendar or no smoother online experience, its true, and those are half loaded pages, to be more precise they are HTML pages without CSS or Javascripts loaded. The server would have closed the connection to your browser before the whole page is delivered. if the session has not expired you could very well press CTRL+F5 to reload the page forcefully. it works many times on IRCTC booking too.Its a standard web development concept known to people who are into it.The internet or web architecture we browse is a combined effort of past 4 decades of human knowledge and as complex as that. There are so many drawbacks or bottle necks and trade offs done to make it smoother and for obvious reasons anything stable and correct would fail to work smoother under heavier load.for example the session expiration time of 5 minutes will work perfect in normal case where it wouldn't take more than 3 minutes to fill a page. it failed under load.

    Ofcourse GRE or USMLE are a different take together. the scale is huge. this is a new case. I never say its the same. its a challenge. Have to wait and see how they handle it with previous expertise. this registration chaos surely would be a lesson to Prometric.

    FYI complexity of BITSAT is nowhere close to this to compare.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Now that u've taken d pain of "getting into our shoes', would u answer a simple question? There's a moron hired by NBE who sits behind their Twitter handle & tweets useless stuff like "Do not panic" ten times a day, and gave the link of this stupid blog. Is that you or any of ur friend? Have u bribed him 4 popularising ur blog?

    ReplyDelete
  13. No offence meant and I am clearly no way related to anyone.

    Popularizing my blog? You could very well read my very few other posts and their nature for what I have posted. Its not intention my friend.

    The web is always open to public any anyone could view this page see or post tweets as you and me do.

    If you find it crap or stupid, you could very well ignore and move on. I don't think you have so much time available to keep on commenting here than studying.

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  14. I hold no personal grudge against u,but i'm aggrieved that ur are tryin to toe their line when they deserve nothing but brickbats,here are few pts for u to pondr before i go back 2 business

    1. Nbe has earned 3750×1lakh for neet pg n 4259×50k for dnb cet,totsls app to 50crores,with this amt,one can expect better server or better web hosting facilities than crashes.

    2. The irctc server if u've ever used in peak time,is very slow and is freq. Down in peak time and season,so the comparison is apt,but in the other way then u intend to say

    3. I logged on at 10:20 am on the first reg day of both dnb n neet when reg site opened just at 9:30am,and forms were being given frm 9:30am only,so just tell me what kind of stupid server crashes within an hr into launch when hardly few thosand had even collected their forms an much less were loggin,it took me 2 hrs for dnb,a much smaller scale exam than neet and 4hs for neet,some friends logged at 10am at banksite itself took more than 5hrs to complete reg,well tell me wud any sane person tolerate this.

    4. Bitsat has around 35-40k students similar to dnb cet but evn dnb cet site crashed in the first hr,so FYI THE CONDITION IS MUCH WORSE HERE AND DNB IS A GOV EXAM

    5. As for servers,they could have used nic servers as done by cbse,aieee n upse which has such capacity to hold reg at this nos.

    6.one is angry more at the mistreatment and no apology given by them for their utter failure rather than their tech limitations,just imagine doin this to iit people,the simply tore down gov lroposal for a stupid exam procedure,what we doctors hav no self respect to be msnipulated like this in name of 1st come 1st served basis,is this a lottery or what.

    7. Prometric has ample exp in conductin exams on twice the scale than this,the cat,but it seems they hav not learned nething frm their mistakes in the 1st online cat exam,the could have deployed the same nos of centers as in cat,insted of half the nos of venues,then mad rush could've been avoided.

    8. A simple statement frm nbe that their is fixed per day quota of seats per center wud hav not led people frm say bangalore book seats in assam,only to find out at 3am in morn that their other friends who could not take seats due to no vacancy got their desired seats n dates,so much for 1st come process.

    The list of injustice meted out to us in much longer but i only wish to convey our deep anguish n resentment to their mistreatment,i only hope that u'll understand our situation and hopefully bear with our pain.


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  15. @ pedic22....well said
    he is claiming he tried to walk in our shoes...actually he cant. its easier than said bro.
    this is the period when one medical student (seriously preparing for exam) studies for atleast 15-18 hours a day...in that period such a mental torture.
    they conducted previous entrance exam in a better way (Aug. DNB)...this time to reduce their workload they tortured us.
    after noticing problems they r not ready to rectify too....what a arrogant board. they know this exam is mandatory...so one has to give no matter whatever it takes. media not taking notice of this (except TOI)...and even people like u (who called them a friend of a medico) are praising them for accepting challenge.
    please dont say again...i tried walking into ur shoes!!!

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    Replies
    1. @docneo, thanks mate,was very upset by the turn of events,at having us to face such humiliation and mistreatment frm the very people tryin to shape our futures

      Delete
  16. @pedic22 & @docneo

    Fine. I agree that Walking into your shoes is not possible for the case that you are slogging day and night with huge subjects to cover and top of it, more confused with new pattern of exams and methods announced in a short notice, in a nutshell, a night mare life,all which I don't face.

    As you mentioned the exam has become mandatory and its the only option. and it seems not OK.

    Now there are three possibilities in my opinion

    1) Totally neglect the exam. Every one of you can boycott, which is is not gonna happen anyway. or file a law suit against the govt. and you know what would be its fate. Its similar to the petrol price hike every time. after which actually to teach a lesson no one should go to the fuel station so that demand comes down and they themselves decrease the price.It never happens.

    2) Mishap happend.so, brood and keep on scolding the authorities to be unplanned and unorganised, which is not going to help anyone.Nothing is gonna change. We are in such a country/politics.They are/will be like this. This is what I see majority of people do. Mistakes happened and I could have written this post scolding NBE for the happening,it would satisfy your mind for its current state and feel happy for the moment that everyone is like us. It wouldn't help anyone in my point.

    3)Some thing is decided gonna happen. Good or bad and Its the only option. Prepare yourself and pat your back to face it. understand the change and proceed further.

    I just tried the last way to support and help out people understand what is it and why.You may be aware of all. Many people out there don't. I never praise the happenings or the authorities involved.

    As a non medico I can't pitch in to study or write exam for you or my friends to help out.At the max I could find resources or help to cross the hurdle with whateverI have or know.

    First case Do you think I would support this crappy education system based on so called MARKS and RANKS which is doing no good to anyone? we keep on running a race right from birth in a world where everyone wants to push us down to come up.Its never fair.

    I too have come across different crappy exams and situations posed by our system and still running to survive my own career.

    Still most life deciding exams in my state/domicile are just MUG up books and VOMIT out for marks or face a lottery system. To the worst, the counselling for and seat allocation is based on that marks and if two people have same marks then the one elder gets a seat.

    I hope you people have got registered in your nearby centres. Prepare well and I could just wish you the best.



    ReplyDelete

  17. @pedic22

    And my views on the points you have posed me. same numbers.

    1) Money? dude, not only this, you pay much more than this. every one is paying and if we start questioning for every penny we pay to the govt, I dunno where it would end. 2G, coalgate, adarsh or common wealth would be the some possible answers.

    2) IRCTC is a different story. It has backdoors so we public dont get proper access and as far as i know its maintained by some private IT company and not paid enough by govt, due to which the quality is like this. The load is constant on that server round the year and its worth spending on it.

    3) So you feel that the server crashed for minimum load. let me go by numbers. Lets say some 25000 ppl where still at bank site. remaining some 10000 would have been trying. and for a single candidate there was more than one person trying to register atleast in my friends circle. I was trying for 4 people simultaneously who were also trying by that time and also with some other sources. so this number itself so high. and as time passed evryone started and the server was down.

    4)BITSAT is conducted on multiple days, so load is not a problem and registration was on papers when I wrote it back in 2006.I

    5) NIC servers are under govt. created and maintained by CDAC, mumbai. I would say it would be far inferior and crash recovery would have taken days to complete.Not much resources would be there to handle such loads.

    Here I felt the registration server is prometric's because the "neet.prometric.com"s IP address 208.76.120.100 found by ping test

    http://www.mediacollege.com/internet/troubleshooter/ping.html

    is located in the USA.

    use http://www.whereisip.net/

    aieee.nic.in is at delhi.
    irctc.co.in is at delhi

    Who knows neet.prometric.com might be a nic server.

    Technically speaking any server is identified only by its IP address provided by their internet service company bsnl, tata etc. Even if you type the domain name "neet.prometric.com" the computer identifies the server by resolving this URL into IP address using a DNS server.

    http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/D/DNS.html

    we are free to buy domain names and IP addresses separately and tie them together anytime

    so neet.prometric.com or any nic.in or any.com is not strictly tied to a particular server.

    I could even buy a domain name as neet.nic.in and host a web server in my Android mobile. very simple.

    who knows the neet.prometric.com IP address may be used for some other purpose after your exams are over.


    6) One can apologise for a single mistake. What if majority are mistakes? Do you expect an apology govt for everything. which is of no use also.

    7) Agree to this point and still the rush to the registration would have been the same leading to same mishap.

    8) incremental slot allocation was not announced which was the biggest mistake i have mentioned in the post already.


    Still there is so much to face. You may be frustrated but dont loose the pace of preparation.

    Are you clear of the normalisation process for evaluation?

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  18. About "Normalization", this is to the author of the blog... the USMLE questions are almost fit for normalization as they address the basic understanding of medicine. In India the papers have always been mostly quizzes and recall based with as minimal application as possible, so it doesn't take a statistics or software guy to understand that these sorts of paper can never be truly comparable. One must remember the USMLE board sets the paper and prometric provides the software & statistical assistance only which will be the same in India where the chief stake will be in NBE's hands and unless NBE changes their reputation of setting recall based questions it is higly unlikely that the performances of candidates can be evaluated on an even platform.

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  19. @Debapriya

    True. The normalizing procedure seems a standard one based on higher level statistic theories which mainly rely on just the raw result data provided to them.

    and I get to know from my friends that DNB exams were just memory testing ones than being application oriented.

    and am just curious to know how the DNB CET exams go on? were they of same kind? normalised? if so, did the results make sense?

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  20. @kishore,

    Firstly, I really think people are furious at NBE and a fraction of that came out in conversations with you. I believe you are too intelligent to take the motion against you personally, it is misguided as you can well see. But about NBE yes I'm furious too.

    No, no one has a clue about how the DNB-CET was normalized. A friend of mine,ranked in the top 10 warned me (as I'm yet to appear any exam, the NEET will be my first biggie) that old papers won't help, then an AIR 100+ seconded that. When I was almost certain about facing more sensible questions a friend (AIR 1500+)claimed his paper was a perfect mash up of previous year papers and his rank was unexpected.

    Now, you must remember DNB-CET questions were like "Which is the longest blah?", "what is the duration of blah-blah?", "When does blah-blah-blah form?". While USMLE questions are vignettes, they have a story that detects your understanding they are never quizzes, not one direct question is asked. So I really don't know how was that exam normalized!

    Also, I'm sure you know that in exams like USMLE if a question is easy/"common" it gets a higher mean response and gets nullified in evaluation and only the tricky ones stand out. The NBE must faithfully follow that, how else can they normalize?

    Take this for instance, let's say blah-blahotosis (that is gibberish by the way) is a very very rare disease and rarely can a doctor know about that. So, when framed it could be an absolutely hard question to answer. But it once came in AIIMS '08, so it is a common one and a lot of people in a particular session can answer that. Had it been USMLE they'd have nullified the question as the response is significantly high to make the question insignificant. Now, the question is what will NBE do about it?
    You tell me, is there any other way to normalize biological questions perfectly other than looking back at national response to a individual questions in individual sessions when all the sessions are over. I'm no good in stats but I've quite a few ISI friends and what I've tried to type here is what they've tried to tell me.

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  21. @Debapriya

    The quality evenness of questions presented in each set exam sessions have a great role in determining the final results. The nature of questions and difficulty levels heavily depend on the board setting the papers, who should be probably your senior medicos across the country.

    Any evaluating software would just take the raw material as result data (your score out of 240) and will not bother about any other parameters like nullifying few answers or so, unless specified for plotting final results.

    Nothing specific if it is biological or any other subject.

    As far as I could read, Prometric has a standard method of evaluation based on a standard mathematical statistic theory named as Item response Theory (ITR) (formulated in 1950s ) whose explanation goes goes in a 185 page document which claims it to be a basic version.

    The same ITR method is claimed used for GRE, GMAT, USMLE, DNB-CET and finally NEET.

    Prometric would have written their own copyrighted software based on ITR algorithm which might happily take the whole raw data in one-shot and give some normalised graphs for analysis to determine ranks. This might be one of reasons that NBE don't allow re-checking/re-totaling/re-evaluation for individuals.


    The NEET info booklet page 36,37 says the same (I believe it to be a copy paste work form DNB CET brochure,they missed to change DNB CET to NEET in a para)

    I don't think the total process is transparent at all stages except the fact that it might have/had some internal quality audition to prove the evaluation worthiness. Prometric claims this method was developed in association with


    The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing.
    American Psychological Association (APA).
    National Council on Measurement in Education.

    I believe the whole method is conceptualized, deveopled and purely "Made in the USA" with no or minimum intervention of any Indian board in this case NBE, at any stage .

    For the case what I could do the maximum from my side is, I can get you know the Nomalization/Evaluation based on ITR explained in simple words with some examples, So that at least you are aware of what and how the normalization might go on, which has clearly no relation with NBE's question quality.





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    Replies
    1. @kishore , firstly i wud like to congratulate u that finally u've made a new friend,in me,for i wud like to unconditionally state that i was never angry at u as person,but on ur views in main blog,which were linked by neet twitter handle as an advert of their cause and them trying to make a fool of us medicosby linkin us to ur blog. Now when we both have both cleared the air,let's proceed on some fruitful discussions.

      1. The whole point abt boycott or protest is tonsend a message across the authorities so that atleast in future such atrocities are not commited,losijg heart n givin up is the easy path,striving hard is the difficult one,sometimes we need to choose it,mayb now's the time.

      2. Let me remind u of 3 great changes that were brought abt by such protest-1st the iim autonomy,when threatened by erstwhile bjp govt mmjoshi was halted in it's track by the concerted efforts of the iim peolple,evn at the threat to their carrere,
      2nd was the great iit debacle of 2006,when inspite of myself getting much higher than the cut offs in maths n chem,only 3 marks less in phys made me lose rank,just imagine the shock n anger when via rti it was revealed that given cutoff of 37 maths,48 phs,88 chem were much higher than the actual cutoffs derived frm the formula iit was using for it-6 for maths 9-phy,12 /14chem,but evn though the iit board accepted it's mistake,new ranklist was not drawn ,n i switched frm iit plans to medico in the pmt counsellin held late,well but the hue n cry at least now made the iit realise it's mistake n they now release answers and scripts n all other student data n the cutoff system has now become more transparent-so the cause was ultimately won, 3rd case is very recent one of the iit board not allowing current gov to push thru it' stupid board marks for iit rank idea and despite threats n buuly,the forced the govt to change it's stance

      3. The above pt''s are just meant to tell u that being a blogger urself,u should knowmthe power of rightful protest,and it twitter could fall armies n nations,proper protest can do wonders. But i support u on ur views that just now we must face the challenge posed n later prepare for our protest.

      4. As for the server business,i damn care it is based in delhi,or dallas or it'govt or private or whatever,my simplevques to everyone is that while we r payin thru the neck for a basic service,if u can't provide it proplerly,u shouldnbe sorry and atleast try to rectify it insted of postin don't panid in ur tweerts,prometric people cat debacle few yrs back was front page news n the were forcrd to do better the next yr,so why can't those people say sorry and promise for better,is it to hard to accept ur mistakes,sayin sorry wuld at least have assured us that the remaing exam activities like test day servers,results tabulation,online conselling wud b done ina better way and wuld hav givn us peace of mind

      Delete
  22. 5. As for the pychrometric analysis n irt n normalisation,what i gathered frm extensive reaserch on web n c friends,was the following
    a) the psychro analysis was developed nearly a century back to test for the unmeasurable parameters of human life,viz. Intelligence,behaviour,emotional maturity,mental toughness etc, with the stanford binet test for iq being derived on this theories.
    b)the 1st theory abt this was the classic response theory which had many shortcomings like now able to judge multilple parametes with accuracy and not able to handle large data vol etc,so the irt came in 1980s(the idea was mooted in 50s but due to lack of computing power to test the theory,it had to to wait till 80s), the irt was an advancement over crt in many ways notwithstanding it's basic design flaw,that was tring to measure the abstract.

    c) but still it was successfully used 4 many tests n formed basis of gre,tofel etc exams-where logical subjects like maths n analytical thinkin was tested,the wiki specially mentions that the irt was designed not fr multiple ans or non absolut knowledge like medical science where a common set of signs may have different diagnis based on mayb a single psrameter,n which is a constant evovling science. Fine. I agree that Wa Laws of maths won't chage much over time,but in our field whst today is fact,is fiction tommorow,but that is what makes the field unique that we re mechanics of god's creation which can't b comprehended by limited knowledge.

    d)well while the basic premise of using this irt in this testing procedure is debatable under law,n already many r plannin suits aftr results, we hav to accept it fr now n try to crack it.

    e)abt the normalisation thing, in aug dnb,the 180 ques had raw marks 1 n 0.1 neg but the wew scaled to out of 800 marks in the final results aftr irt analysis,now as things stands there is absolutely no way to predict how the results will pan unless whole of the data is put in after the exams taking into account the day to day n ques to ques variations in the exam and how the analysis of this wide array of data is done by the prometric using the us based algorithm,i fully agree with @debapriya that the way usmle n other us exams are conducted n their basic premise of concept based ques can'b expected by these bull headed nbe people who r no aiims or pgi n have frever basedvtheir dnb exms on crappy shitty one liners with do or die answers.

    Lastly i hope that mayb god will help us out in these dark times when everything seems to b lost cause n mayb the change will b fr good. I thank again to kishore for finally seeing the true side if the game n tryin to help us out,buddy if anytime u need any info on our field i'll happily provide it n expect u to provide more insight in ares of ur expertise as n when needed b us.

    ReplyDelete
  23. @pedic22

    Thats nice to hear :-) You are welcome. Misconceptions, that too under a pressurized situation is unavoidable sometimes. Depends how we handle it.

    Science as a whole is ever changing and with so much of development and specializations in every field, there is a widening knowledge gap leading to misunderstandings among us inturn exploited by many selfish heads,and thus knowledge sharing becomes caring. you are always welcome with any sort of query for help from my side.A connected human network always helps.we could connect on some social network for the case.

    One strange thing I could see is that I tweeted this blog address with #neetpg2012 and next day I found people reacting here, only after which I came to know that @neetpg2012 handle has retweeted it and also have blocked me to visit them again.I don't understand.


    Protests are healthy and the same time we should make us ourselves stable to help others. RTI is a boon but the time taken and the late reactions sometimes make no use to us, moreover RTI is not anonymous, which sometimes questions our self- security in sensitive legal cases. So many RTI activists are killed and the news never comes out or gets supressed.

    Regarding the normalization, not a mathematician, but am now half way, going through the Item Reponse Theory basics to know how it works. As for now what I understand is that, the theory seems to be heavily relying on the relative performance of candidates writing the exams, provided the question sets are of equal quality on all sessions.

    At a basic level other than students raw score, I could see the theory can take into account,

    Probability of the difficulty level of each question derived by taking into account how many students have answered right.
    Probability to discriminate how a particular question is exactly handled by high profile student and a low profile one.
    Probability to know how likely candidates would have guessed the answers.

    and many more parameters can be included or removed decided by the evaluators.

    And from the mention by the theory itself,for the final result ,the raw score undergoes high mathematical iterations for probabilites which leads to some approximations and mismatches from original data.

    So its better to be prepared for shocks.




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  24. @kishore nicely said,u counld connect with me on fb somsubhra pal or twitter,(somdoc44), n we could chat up sometimes on life n it's myriad issues,it's always nice to talk to someone with an open mind 4 facts 4 i don't like strong critics or mindless followers as both the people have nothin to offer for onself improvement.

    As fr the irt,yes i'm prepared fr shocks but then again information is power n if u can enlighten some more on this side it will b highly appreciated. Tk cr

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  25. Common Sense says that they should have handled it in two parts

    Let every one register in the system and get an user name and password

    They should have allowed some time - say 3 to 4 weeks for it

    -

    Then, based on the number who have registered, they should have prepared the slots

    -

    Then

    They should have given the option (to login with the user name and password) and select the centre date on a single day

    -

    Selling the voucher and asking the candidates to register all details and then selecting the date and centre on the same day is the reason for this confusion

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  26. Kishore Sheik Ahamed Sir

    Are you aware of the malpractices that happen along with AIPG

    With no paper trail, will it not be easy for the fraudsters

    ReplyDelete
  27. Please don't give the boiler plate reply that malpractices are there is every exam :) :)

    AIPG has an different history altogether

    Request you to please refer !

    ReplyDelete
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