National Testing Agency prepares to hold CUET
A million candidates. Each applying for at least five universities. A possible 60,000 subject combinations.
Those are the mind-boggling statistics of the first-ever common university entrance exam (CUET) that will be conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA) for undergraduate admissions to 86 universities between July 15 and August 10.
According to officials in NTA, the results will be declared by August 20. The agency will conthe duct the computer-based test in 554 cities across India and 13 cities outside the country at around 800-1000 centres. “Although 1 million candidates have applied for CUET-UG, each of these candidates have applied to at least five universities on an average; therefore, the total number of applications are over 5 million,” said one NTA official who asked not to be named.
NTA has already been conducting some of the country’s major entrance exams including the Joint Entrance Test (JEE) for admission to engineering colleges and the National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET) for admission to medical colleges. But CUET, the officials cited in the first instance said, poses challenges at an entirely different level.
According to the first NTA official: “In NEET and JEE (Mains) there are no subject combinations. It is either physics, chemistry and mathematics or physics, chemistry and biology and everybody takes these combinations only. Here there are around 60,000 combinations. That makes CUET-UG a big exercise. Therefore, it will be conducted for over 10 days in more than 15 shifts, which is the longest duration of any entrance exam ever conducted in India.”
It may be the most complex, but CUET won’t be the largest. That distinction remains with NEET. “In terms of number of applications NEET still gets the highest number of applicants. This year it is 1.8 million. But in terms of complexity and number of subjects CUET-UG is the biggest exam of the country,” the first official said. Last week, NTA wrote to vice chancellors of all universities across the country to assess and provide closed areas in their campuses for setting up examination centres.