Entrance test for central universities: how and why
Categories: US Education News
On Monday, the University Grants Commission (UGC) announced the introduction of the Central University Entrance Test (CUET), which is now mandatory for undergraduate admission at any of the 45 central universities in the country.Several governments, over the years, have made attempts to replace multiple entrance tests with a single one to reduce the burden on higher education aspirants. In fact, even CUET is not new. It had been launched as the Central Universities Common Entrance Test (CUCET) in 2010 under the UPA-II government, but had failed to gather steam since only 14 central universities had adopted it until last year. CUET is a revamped version of CUCET and it’s now compulsory for all 45 central universities to adopt it. This has come after the announcement of the new National Education Policy (NEP), which advocates the need for an entrance test for university admissions.For skill-based courses that have major practical components, such as music, painting, sculpture and theatre, universities will be allowed to conduct practical exams or interviews along with CUET. For professional programmes such as engineering and MBBS, central universities will admit through the entrance exams JEE (Main) and NEET respectively. The government did not favour using Board marks for admission because of the “diversity” in evaluation methods adopted by different Boards. “Some Boards are more generous than others in marking and this gives their students an unfair advantage over others,” said a government official who spoke on anonymity.The application window for the examination will open in the first week of April. But unlike JEE (Main), there will be no common counselling for admission to central universities based on the CUET score. Each university is free to define its admission process based on the merit list prepared by the NTA. However, UGC chairman M Jagadesh Kumar did not rule out joint counselling in future. The UGC chairman said that the three-and-a-half-hour computer-based entrance test will only have multiple choice questions based on the content of NCERT textbooks. CUET will essentially have three parts.The first part will test a candidate on a language of her choice.The second part of CUET is focused on testing a candidate’s domain-specific knowledge.The third part of the entrance test will be a general test with questions on general knowledge, current affairs, general mental ability, numerical ability, quantitative reasoning logical and analytical reasoning. A candidate will appear for the general test only if it’s desired by the programme and university of choice. Apart from the compulsory language test, a candidate’s participation in the domain-specific part of CUET and the general test will depend on whether a central university wants it for the programme she is applying for.At this moment, CUET is compulsory for central universities but the government is open to other institutions, including private universities, adopting this examination instead of conducting their own.