WHILE Covid-19 has been playing havoc with the national health, the newly-formed Pakistan Medical Commission (PMC) has been ruining the lives of our future doctors in many ways. The most recent example of PMC’s mismanagement is the medical college entrance test which was initially due to be conducted on Oct 18 and was postponed and rescheduled for Nov 15. Along with the new date, a new syllabus was introduced, which caused a lot of mental stress for the students.

However, the test was postponed again just a day before it was to be conducted and was rescheduled for Nov 29. Subsequently, new roll numbers were issued, but thousands of students did not receive them as the PMC could not even upload those on its website in time.

Finally, the test was conducted, but there were reportedly several questions that did not match the given syllabus. Since it was conducted for all pre-medical students, the PMC could not make sure that the test conducted was suitable for the students of all provinces and boards.

To cover this anomaly, the commission announced an extremely illogical grace marks policy. Finally, on Dec 16, the PMC announced the results that were faulty and completely unacceptable as there were massive data entry flaws. My own son’s roll number from Punjab showed the name of a girl from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Hundreds of students who were present were marked absent.

It is nothing but great mental stress to more than 120,000 young and brilliant students from across the country.

When the complaints started hitting the PMC doors, it retracted the result by midday on Dec 16, and tweeted the following message: “As it is a computer-generated result, therefore, to check for any discrepancy, the system has been made offline. It will be live as soon as the error has been checked.”

Once the so-called verified results were put back online, the problem was still there as was mentioned by the news report ‘Students, parents protest as PMC issues verified MDCAT results’ (Dec 19).

Before this mismanagement, these examinations used to be conducted smoothly under the auspices of PMC’s predecessor, the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC). Not only this, but the PMDC had forced the private medical colleges to charge a limited fee.

Under the PMC, private medical colleges have been given a green signal to increase their fee arbitrarily, and, as a result of this independence, they have announced an incredible increase in their fee packages.

Is there someone to look into all these issues?

Dr Muhammad Ajmal Khan
Gujranwala

Published in Dawn, December 24th, 2020