NEET 2027

The exam moves to a screen. Almost nobody has practised on one.

On 15 May 2026 the Union Education Minister announced that NEET-UG moves to computer-based testing from 2027, and NTA has confirmed it to the Supreme Court. The syllabus does not change. The paper does not change. What changes is that roughly 2.2 million candidates will sit it on software none of them has used, with material from coaching institutes built for OMR sheets.

What stays the same

  • 180 questions, 720 marks. Biology is 90 of them, half the paper.
  • +4 for correct, −1 for incorrect, 0 for unattempted.
  • NCERT Class 11 and 12 syllabus, unchanged.
  • Held at an NTA centre. It is not a test you take from home.

What changes

  • One question per screen, answered with a mouse. No booklet to flick through, and no writing on the question itself.
  • A question palette down the right showing every question’s status at a glance.
  • Selecting an option does not answer the question. Only pressing Save & Next does.
  • Likely spread over 2–3 days with two shifts a day, scored by percentile normalisation.

The question palette, in NTA’s own colours

Five states. Learning to read them under time pressure is a skill, and it is cheaper to learn now than at minute 140 of the real thing.

24Not visited. You have not visited the question yet.
24Not answered. You opened it and left without saving an answer.
24Answered. You saved an answer. This is the only state that scores.
24Marked for review. Flagged to come back to, with no saved answer. Scores nothing.
24Answered & marked. Saved an answer AND flagged it. Still evaluated. The flag costs you nothing.

Where first-time candidates actually lose marks

These are not biology mistakes. They are interface mistakes, and they are well documented from years of JEE Main running on this same software.

  1. Not pressing Save & Next. You choose the right option, move on, and score zero. On paper a filled bubble is a filled bubble; here it is not. This is the single most common way marks disappear.
  2. Marking too much for review. Half a purple palette at the end is not a review plan, it is a panic surface.
  3. Mouse time.Five to ten seconds per question of navigation, across 180 questions, is 15–30 minutes you did not budget.
  4. Right answer, wrong option clicked. Common under time pressure, and invisible until results.
  5. Screen fatigue. Three hours of reading on a monitor is not three hours of reading on paper. It is trainable, and untrained it costs accuracy in the last hour.

Multiple shifts, and why your raw score is not your score

With the exam spread over several shifts, some papers are inevitably harder than others. NTA handles this with percentile normalisation, the same method already used for JEE Main and CUET. Your rank is decided by how you did relative to everyone in your own shift, not by your raw total compared to someone else’s.

The practical consequence: a “hard shift” is not a punishment, and there is nothing to be gained from trying to guess which slot is easier. Prepare for the format, not the lottery.

How we prepare you for it

We rebuilt the NTA interface, the palette, the four buttons, the clock, the submit summary, and we count every time you select an answer without saving it. After a mock you get two numbers: marks lost to biology, and marks lost to the software. The second should be zero, and it is entirely a habit.

Then every question you got wrong is traced back to the exact NCERT line that would have answered it, drawn from every NEET, AIPMT and predecessor Biology paper from 1988 to 2026.

Start the free 5-min diagnosticPreview two chapters free

NTA has not yet published the NEET 2027 information bulletin. The interface described here is the one NTA currently runs for JEE Main and CUET, which NEET is expected to inherit. If the bulletin differs, this page and our simulator change with it.