Jawaharlal Nehru University has been appealing to the union government to change the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) format for postgraduate admissions, the institution’s vice-chancellor Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit said.
Pandit said the admissions to master’s programmes could not be conducted through Multiple Choice Question (MCQ) tests and spoke of the impact on student intake in the absence of qualitative testing.
Referring to the university’s decision to follow the CUET for admissions, she said, “The acceptance to join (CUET), it was done by the previous administration… If I was there, I would have put in these concerns in writing. Because it’s very important, I think, that we tell the government because the bureaucracy does not understand.”
She added, “So, it is important that as a teacher, stakeholder within the system, we have to make them understand that these are the difficulties that we have in reality,” adding: “We are not opposing the system, per se, but the implementation of the system can be disastrous if we are going to have this kind of uniformity.”
CUET-PG is the new common entrance test for admission to postgraduate programmes at central universities. As many as 66 universities, mostly centre-run, have adopted the computer-based CUET-PG for admissions in the academic session 2022-23. It will be held in two shifts each on September 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, and 11 in around 500 cities in India and 13 centres abroad.
The entrance examination tests students only through MCQs. There will be 100 questions in each paper on subjects ranging from language comprehension, verbal ability, social sciences, mathematics, science, general awareness, mathematical and quantitative ability, analytical skills, as well as domain subject-related questions.
Courtesy : The Indian Express