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.