KARACHI: Educationists demand abolition of entrance test
By Mukhtar Alam
KARACHI, Nov 4: Following the failure of the provincial health department to ensure a transparent process of the test for admission to its medical education institutions, educationists and students have demanded immediate abolition of the entrance- test system.
They have also demanded a high-level enquiry to ascertain the reasons and determine the hands behind the leakage of the MBBS and BDS entrance test conducted by the Institute of Business Administration at three different centres in the province on October 28.
Though the health department has revoked the October 28 entrance test held for about 5,500 students and announced another test to be held on Nov 15, students are yet to come out of the shock.
They wonder if this time the IBA would maintain the secrecy and sanctity of the entrance test which has been imposed on them, ignoring their 12 years of school and college education and HSC examinations conducted by the educational boards in the province.
Senior teachers at the University of Karachi and city colleges are of the view that the government could at least institute an enquiry to restore the confidence of the students.
To say that the duplication or recycling of the IBA test paper of 1999 was just an error and not a case of malpractice is not justified.
“Absence of any enquiry indicates a well-organised and corrupt group working in connivance with the officials concerned. The delay on the part of the government in ordering any enquiry is tantamount to promoting the ills in education and health sector,” said a student.
“The IBA entrance test has been controversial since its inception, but the health department offered the testing job, carried out against huge payments, to the IBA, which was strange, particularly in a situation when there was no legal or any other compulsion in this connection,” said a KU teacher and suggested that the government should revise its idea of the entrance test as a tool for admission to medical colleges.
Students and teachers said that health department should adopt the entrance test just a means to of testing the aptitude of the students towards medical education. “Other professional institutions, including the NED University of Engineering and Technology, have devised tests which have nothing to undermine the positions and marks awarded by the intermediate education boards,” said a teacher and added that the health department should also discard the weightage (50 per cent) given to its entrance test.
Parents said that the reholding of the IBA entrance test on a short notice was again an injustice to students. After appearing in the entrance test, some students have gone out of the city for recreation or other social obligations.
When contacted for his comments, chairman of the Board of Intermediate Education, Karachi, Prof Sharif Memon, said that he had already presented a proposal to the government regarding the setting up of an educational testing authority under the control of the provincial governor, similar to the testing body established in the NWFP.
He said that though his educational board was making all out efforts to conduct its examinations in a fool-proof manner, he would not say that the policy of conducting the entrance test for admission to professional colleges was a mockery of the BIE examination. In fact, after the introduction of the entrance tests the process of examinations held by the board had become more transparent and reliable, he added and described it as “checks” on the board’s performance.
He expressed the view that the weightage system for preparing the merit lists of candidates seeking admission to medical colleges could be revised as the present one was unjustified. He said that weightage to entrance test should be reduced or taken as a qualifier, only keeping the marks awarded by the educational boards as the soul criterion for determining the merit of any student for admission to professional colleges, like in the case of the NED University.
Sources in the government said that it had, in principle, been decided not to award the testing job to the IBA as it was no more reliable.
There had been reports of incompetence for the last many years, and now the health department would have to look for some new options, said an official.
It was further said that there was no legal obligation or directives from the higher authorities to prefer the IBA for the test purposes. The health department had hired the institute only because it was a government agency, said a source in the department.
A source said that government had already made up its mind not to hire the IBA again and set up its own testing body. The IBA was hired for the Nov 15 test only because the time was too short to hire others or devise any new mechanism, claimed the source.
However, officials at the IBA still maintain that the recycling was purely a mishap for which no body at the IBA could be blamed or penalised. “We take dozens of such entry tests every year for various bodies as a social service on very nominal rates, and there is nothing to smell fishy in the IBA”, said one official.
