NEET re-test: How parents can help children ‘peak’ again

Imagine a parent knocking at the door of a teenager’s room. The teenager is not opening. The parent is not giving up. Each one, on either side of the door, desperately trying to cope with the news of the NEET exam cancellation.

The teen inside was my mentee. But it could have been any of the 22 lakh aspiring doctors who took the NEET test on May 3 with hopes of securing a seat in a medical college.

When you sign up for an entrance exam like NEET, it’s not just a child preparing over months or even years, it is the family building hope together. Getting that hope crushed, not because of their child’s poor performance but because of a system’s failure, is a different kind of crash. This crash has no name. We don’t know what to call it, and therefore, don’t know how to face it. But individuals and families pay for it. Two 18-year-old girls, Maithili Ashok Sonwane from Maharashtra and Bhagyashree from Karnataka, and a boy, Pradeep Meghwal from Rajasthan, didn’t survive to take the re-test on June 21.

In situations like NEET cancellation, parents are the first line of response. In sport, we understand peak performance. An athlete trains for months, goes through the taper, mentally preps to peak on the day of the race, and runs it. Then imagine the race is cancelled after he has crossed the finish line and he is asked to race again in a few weeks.

At this point, the body should be in rest and recovery. But now it cannot be. The mind has drained all its motivation and has to find it again. But the mind is bogged down by one question it cannot shake. What if the system fails again? What if I cannot perform like I did before?

Overcoming the crash
To peak again, one has to manage the fatigue, the dim motivation, and the anxiety of a repeat performance. It is time when we, as parents and educators, build processes that hold the examinee steady through actionable steps. Do not cry over the system. It is not in our control, so control the controllables and be mindful of the following:

Build a ritual before you build a schedule: If there is a ritual you followed before May 3, bring it back. If not, introduce breathwork. Four counts in. Four counts hold. Six counts out. Do it together, at the beginning of the day, before bedtime, or two minutes before every study session. It is also how you, as a parent, stay close without crowding them.

An athlete does not walk onto the track still carrying the weight of the morning. Neither should your child open a textbook still carrying the weight of the cancelled test. Add journaling at night. Writing is a simple way of processing the day. A couple of lines on what they felt, what was hard, what clicked, allows your child to stay honest with their preparation.

Say the right things: What parents say becomes a guiding voice inside a learner’s mind. Long after you leave the room, that voice stays. It would be wrong to say “work harder”. He has already worked hard. What your child needs to hear now is something different.

An athlete preparing for Peak 2 does not add more volume to training. He sharpens what he already has. Your child still has the same foundation. It did not disappear on May 3. It was stress-tested. The only thing left to do is get smarter. Devise shortcuts for quick recall. Practice the questions that cost them time. Build faster routes to what they already know.

Make it collaborative: One does not need to become a tutor to offer support. Encourage collaboration with friends who are also re-appearing, not to compare, but to work together. Share a question. Discuss an approach. The social side of learning is not a distraction. It is a scaffold.

Use AI tools like Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT. Take a question from the paper. Ask it to generate five similar ones. Ask it to explain where the trap in a question is. Ask it to quiz on the topics that are process ordering or statement assertions, the style of questions that make the paper hard. This is not cheating. This is smart preparation. It turns a solitary revision session into a conversation. Treat this phase as practice. Not as the real test. The pressure of Peak 2 drops when your child approaches it as refinement, not repetition.

Break the rhythm: Have you ever thought about how we pay money to our banks to follow their rules? No banking on holidays. Thankfully, digital banking is clearing some of that. We follow systems without asking whether they were built for us. The coaching system works the same way. It is designed to push for more. More papers, more practice, more volume. The assumption is that the more you practice, the better you get.

But now is not the time for more. You do not need to add stress. You need to add skill. Break the rhythm. Instead of solving 180 questions in three hours, solve 45 questions in 40 minutes each sitting. Take a break in between two sittings. Solve over two days. Spend more time with the errors; add them to your notes. This builds time-pressure skills and fills up knowledge gaps. Do not chase volume. Chase skill.

Use writing as a weapon: This year, the retest is still pen and paper. Practising with pen and paper serves better than practising digitally. Research consistently shows that reading comprehension and recall vary between online and offline modes. Children who are used to reading and writing digitally find it harder to write by hand, and this puts an additional strain on memory recall.

This is a good time to return to pen and paper. Get AI to generate sample papers as PDFs and print them. Support your child, encourage him and you stay. The boy, who did not come out of his room for hours, eventually did. He sat at his desk. He opened his notebook. He was ready to begin, again. That is enough. That is where Peak 2 starts. To peak again, we have to be together. Work smarter, not harder. They have done this before. This time, we are stronger together.

(Singh is founder of Habits for Thinking, a program which helps students and professionals develop a growth mindset)