ISLAMABAD: Considering the complaints of over 6,000 students, the Pakistan Medical Commission (PMC) has decided to allow the candidates appearing for Medical and Dental Colleges Admission Test (MDCAT) to change provincial centres.

“The student portal will open from today (Saturday) and candidates will be allowed to change their centers by 12 noon till Nov 2. Students will only be allowed to change centres from university in one province to another, but not within the same province. Moreover, students can change their examination centres only once,” PMC Vice President Dr Khursheed Ahmad said while talking to Dawn on Friday.

He said it would be the last chance for the students and no further requests will be entertained after Nov 2. In reply to a question, he said the PMC had last year held a centralised online examination for which a question bank was developed.

Student portal for one-time facility opens today

“Although this year we have allowed universities to hold exams in the provinces by their own so that transparency could be ensured, they [universities] will have to use the same question bank which was developed by the PMC,” he said.

“However, the decision that now public sector universities will hold MDCAT in the provinces has confused a large number of candidates whether the universities will use provincial syllabus for test,” he said.

Dr Khursheed explained that if a student belonging to Bhakkar district (Punjab) has enrolled himself for Dera Ismail Khan district (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), he assumes that University of Health Sciences (UHS) will use syllabus of Punjab for MDCAT and in DI Khan syllabus of KP will be used.

“Although it is not correct, as all universities will have to use the same question bank, we were continuously getting complaints and it has been decided to allow the candidates to change their centres once,” he said.

However, Dr Khursheed said, students will not be allowed to change centres within provinces such as from Peshawar to Abbottabad or from Karachi to Hyderabad.

The National Assembly’s Standing Committee on National Health Services (NHS) had on Oct 27 also taken up this issue. A meeting of the committee, chaired by PTI lawmaker Dr Mohammad Afzal Dhandla, regretted that a large number of local and overseas students will not be able to get their centres changed due to the short time given by the PMC, thus would not be able to take exams. The committee called for giving them an opportunity to get their centres changed.

MDCAT will be held on Nov 13 across Pakistan and in two other countries — the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. It will be a paper-based manual exam and answer keys of the papers will be uploaded by the universities concerned on PMC’s website on the same day after the exam. The duration of exam will be three and a half hours.

Published in Dawn, October 29th, 2022