UGC’s proposal to merge NEET and JEE into CUET evokes mixed reaction
The University Grants Commission’s plan to merge the national engineering and medical entrance exams into the existing Common University Entrance Test (CUET) has received mixed reactions.
UGC chairperson M Jagadesh Kumar on Friday said the government was looking at introducing the integrated entrance exam at the earliest, preferably by next year.“We have three major entrance examinations — National Eligibility Entrance Exam , Joint Entrance Examination (Main) and CUET — and since a large number of students appearing for these exams are common and they are all conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA). Therefore, we thought why not use CUET scores alone for admission to multiple disciplines,” he said.
Kumar said the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 also envisages “one nation, one entrance” and this will reduce the students’ burden of taking multiple entrance examinations.However, Anand Kumar, founder of super 30 programme known for coaching underprivileged students for engineering entrance exam, said a Scholastic Assessment Test ( SAT) like exam, which also considers school perform
The exam may be conducted twice a year to provide more opportunities to students
ance, won’t work in the Indian context.
Keshav Agarwal, president, Educators Society — a consortium of around 300 coaching centres in Delhi — said: “There is a huge difference between difficulty levels of JEE and CUET exam. Besides, so many issues were reported during the ongoing CUET exams.”On technical glitches reported during ongoing CUET exams, Kumar said the NTA is working on it.
He said the Union ministry of education and UGC have started the discussions to prepare the stakeholders. “We don’t want to announce anything suddenly,” he said.“The UGC will form a committee of experts which will make recommendations for an integrated entrance exam and that will be shared with the stakeholders. Based on that, the ministry and UGC will decide the modalities of the exam,” he said.
The exam may be conducted twice a year to provide more opportunities to students, he said. A senior NTA official said: “Once a committee is formed and submits its recommendations, NTA will start preparing for the integrated exam.” A senior IIT-Delhi official, who did not wish to be named, said, “If the NTA conducts the exam for over 20 lakh students, it will be done in at least 10 phases. So, if the exam has to be conducted twice a year, it has to be done 20 times. So many question papers have to be prepared using a limited NCERT syllabus. There is no way that the questions won’t get repeated.”
A Class 12 student at a government school, Sumit Kumar, questioned how the government will take care of the difference in the difficulty level of the exams.“These three exams have their own difficulty levels. Both JEE(Main) and NEET are tougher than the CUET. We will have to see if the government will come up with a different cut-off system for admissions to different courses,” he said.