LAHORE, Dec 27: Around 9,000 candidates will appear for the entry test for admission to seven medical and dental colleges for the session 2002-03 on Sunday (today).

The 150-minute test will be conducted by the University of Engineering and Technology (UET) simultaneously at Lahore, Multan, Rawalpindi, Faisalabad and Bahawalpur from 9am onwards. The entry test at Lahore will be held on the UET campus.

It may be mentioned that the entry test date was extended from Dec 15 to Dec 29 following Punjab government’s decision to allow all those students to apply and appear for the entry test who secured at least 65 per cent marks in the intermediate examination.

The Punjab government had earlier debarred these students by announcing a policy that only those students would apply who secured 70 per cent or above marks in their intermediate examination.

Initially, the Punjab Medical and Dental Colleges Admission Board received around 6,500 applications till the closing date on Oct 31.

However, the students, who were affected by the change in the policy that allowed only those students to apply who had secured at least 70 per cent marks in their intermediate examination, raised their voice against the decision and moved the Lahore High Court and later its Multan bench.

The courts decided in favour of the affected students and Punjab Chief Minister Pervaiz Elahi directed the health department and the admission board to re-advertize to seek applications from all those candidates who secured 60 per cent or more marks in the intermediate examination.

The admission board then invited applications from the affected students between Dec 10 to Dec 14 and received around 2,500 applications.

The admission board has also announced that the entry test results will be declared on Jan 18 and the list of 2,000 top merit students will be put up at all medical and dental colleges same day.

The board said that the selected 2,000 students would be eligible to apply for admission to medical and dental colleges on prescribed forms between Jan 20 to Jan 27 next year.

It may be mentioned that the Punjab government has approved to make admissions on 1,621 allocated seats for the first year MBBS session 2002-03. The break-up of seats allocates 1,111 seats on open merit, 162 on reserved basis and 348 additional seats in all seven medical colleges to be filled on open merit for the academic session 2002-03 only.

The two-and-half-hours entry test will have 220 multiple choice questions (MCQs). The biology section will have 70 questions, physics and chemistry will have 60 questions each and English portion of the test will have 30 questions. Each question will carry five marks and each wrong answer will minus one mark.