PESHAWAR, Dec 16: Rules for students appearing in professional college entry tests have been relaxed. Besides, the testing authority has revised its admission policy to facilitate prospective candidates.

The Education Testing and Evaluation Authority will now hold entry tests all over the province at intermediate and secondary board levels instead of professional colleges holding their own adimission tests.

The authority has asked the officials concerned to make arrangements accordingly. The decision would enable students of various districts to appear in the entry tests to be conducted by their respective intermediate and secondary education boards instead of taking part in tests which were earlier conducted only in Peshawar and Abbottabad.

An official handout issued here on Wednesday said that the 11th ETEA meeting, presided over by NWFP Governor Syed Iftikhar Hussain Shah, decided to relax its testing and evaluation policy for students making more than one attempt to get admission in professional colleges.

According to the new policy, the rule regarding the number of attempts to appear in entry tests has been relaxed and English has been made compulsory in both engineering and medical college entrance tests with 20 multiple-choice questions each.

Candidates seeking admission to medical colleges have also been exempted from appearing in mathematics test. Candidates could now change their professions after fulfilling a given set of requirements, the handout said.

The meeting also allowed the authority to conduct tests for candidates from the Malakand and Swat boards at a single point while other candidates would appear from their respective intermediate and secondary education boards.

The decision was taken after successfully conducting the test at Abbottabad this year, the handout said. The meeting decided that requests for re-totalling of marks would only be entertained if the request for the same is filed within 48 hours after the announcement of the provisional results.

The authority would be responsible for declaring the final results within next 24 hours. Similarly, the tests would continue to be held within a fortnight after the declaration of results by the boards.

There would be no difficulty in holding entrance tests on a single date throughout the province as all provincial boards were now bound to declare results simultaneously this year and, the handout said. The meeting also approved of the authority's budget estimates for next year besides finalizing a plan for purchasing more computers for smoothly conducting the tests.

The NWFP governor urged the authority to look into the possibility of printing both question and answer parts on a single sheet to eliminate apprehensions expressed by a segment of the society. He said the authorities concerned should continue their efforts to further compress the examination schedule and allow students maximum time for study.

The meeting was attended by Secretary of the Higher Education Sahibzada Mohammad Khalid, Additional Secretary to the Governor Sikandar Qayyum, Chairman of the Board of Intermediated and Secondary Education, Peshawar, Manzoor Iqbal Banguish and representatives of the NWFP University of Engineering and Technology and the Khyber Medical College.