After Graduate Courses, Post-Graduate Courses Too Will Have Common Entrance Exams Across India

Chairman of the University Grants Commission (UGC) M. Jagadesh Kumar said that postgraduate admissions will soon be conducted through the Common University Entrance Test (CUET).

The CUET was introduced last month as a single window for admissions to undergraduate programmes in central universities across the country.

Since then, many other non-central universities also opted to adopt the test.

Annual Change In Pattern

It would be conducted after the Class 12 board exams with a gap of around 45 days, education ministry officials said.

The patterns will keep changing each year since coaching centres will be able to predict if the pattern gets standardised.

Therefore, while the contents will be drawn from the Class 12 syllabus, select changes will be made every year.

This way, any candidate who is well-versed with the entire Class 12 syllabus will perform better.

Exam Schedule

The schedule for postgraduates will likely be announced next week.

As per the plan, the first CUET could be conducted between the last week of May and first week of Juneto be followed by the first or second week of July.

This should give students time of over a month to revise.

Onboarding More Unis

Encouraged by the “overwhelming response” from educational institutions, the UGC is working on extending the CUET to postgraduate programmes in central universities.

At present, different universities have their own criteria for postgraduate admissions.

Most use their own entrance exams while some accept graduation marks as a criterion for admission.

Introducing CUET in his process will make things more uniform.

Students will be able to apply for different universities through a single portal.

Twice A Year Exercise?

Kumar, a former vice chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) said that the possibility of holding CUET twice a year is being discussed.

The move would help students who could not appear or clear it the first time do so the second time.

The idea of the common entrance test is to help unburden students from their pressure to score well in their Class 12 exams and simply focus on learning.

The UGC chairman said that this is another reason the commission wants to give students two chances to clear the exam.

On Coaching Culture And Competition

Kumar was questioned on whether CUET will encourage coaching culture.

He said it won’t since coaching culture mostly arises in cases of huge competition, like in the case of JEE, where nearly 12 lakh students compete for 16,000 seats.

This is about a 1:75 competition.

This would reduce to 1:5 if some of the best state and deemed-to-be universities join the 45 central universities which have 1.2 lakh seats, raising the seats to 3 lakh.

Held In 13 Languages

CUET has already received registrations from more than one lakh students between 2 April and 13 April 2022.

It will be conducted in 13 languages:

• English
• Hindi
• Assamese
• Bengali
• Gujarati
• Kannada
• Malayalam
• Marathi
• Odia
• Punjabi
• Tamil
• Telugu
• Urdu

The model questions are already being uploaded for aspirants to understand the test better.