Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Update on 'Justice at last!'


Just a quick update on the post about the ongoing saga of court battles about the validity entrance examinations in Tamil Nadu. The latest is that the Supreme Court has decided not to stay the Chennai High Court order that went against the Tamil Nadu government. Badri has the details, and links to the relevant news stories.

The bottomline is that this year's admissions process will proceed according to the original scheme: entrance exam results will count, and so will the results of improvement exams. The procedure for next year's admissions cycle will depend on the Supreme Court verdict.

It will be really nice if the Supreme Court makes use of this case to probe further into the broader question of entrance exams; it will be nice if it orders all the regulatory authorities (AICTE, the Medical Council of India, and UGC) to come up with some way of reducing the number of entrance exams to just one for each subject.

Let me just say what I would like in this National level test -- let us just call it N-CET -- for all the higher secondary students (clearly, the state level CETs will have to go) :

  • N-CET has a separate test for each discipline; the list of disciplines could include (aside from the present set: mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology) history, economics, accountancy, languages, etc, which are taught at the higher secondary level; thus, admission into the arts and commerce courses can also be made based on the N-CET results.
  • N-CET exam can be offered on demand, and a student may be permitted to take it several times if he / she so desires; thus, the pattern of administration of the exams can be like that of GRE.

As pointed out by Sriram (Anonymous-2) in the comments section of this post, BITS-Pilani offers a computerized test on demand; however, BITS doesn't allow a student to take the exam multiple times in a year.

We should move towards N-CET, and I would really like to see the Supreme Court use this opportunity to start a debate, and push our regulators to come up with a viable scheme.

1 Comments:

  1. Anonymous said...

    Hi, There is a case still pending with the Supreme Court (I think being heard by a 7 judge bench) where Karnataka and Kerala govts are parties, which is examining the multiple entrance exams, management quotas etc. I read an item on The Hindu today. Will look up the URL and post.