RAWALPINDI, Dec 10: The entrance test for admission to medical colleges of Punjab will be held simultaneously in five cities on December 23, Dawn has learnt.
This will be the fourth such test after its introduction by former chief minister Shahbaz Sharif in 1998.
The provincial government had announced that the test was being introduced to eliminate booty-mafia from penetrating into the double-check system of admission and giving a ray of hope to the hardworking students to get admission in professional colleges.
The test will be held in Rawalpindi, Lahore, Faisalabad, Multan and for the first time in Bahawalpur.
This year, the provincial government has announced admissions on 1,528 seats, including 1,474 on open merit, in MBBS and about 200 seats in the BDS in seven medical colleges.
The colleges are Rawalpindi Medical College; King Edward Medical College, Lahore; Fatima Jinnah Medical College, Lahore; Allama Iqbal Medical College, Lahore; Quaid-i-Azam Medical College, Bahawalpur; Nishtar Medical College, Multan; and Punjab Medical College, Faisalabad.
The University of Engineering and Technology (UET), Lahore, has been given the responsibility to conduct the test for the first time.
Several changes have been made in the question paper format as well. The duration of the test has been extended from 120 to 150 minutes. The candidates will be required to attempt 220 questions, 61 each in physics, chemistry and biology and 37 in English, in the stipulated time.
Five marks will be given for each correct answer, while one mark will be deducted for each wrong answer. The merit list will be decided by adding 50 per cent marks of the test and 50 per cent marks of the HSSC examination.
Earlier, the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Karachi, had conducted three tests in 1998, 1999 and 2000. Each time, the transparency of the test as well as the credibility of the IBA was hit by controversies. Over 11,000 candidates had appeared in the first entrance test held at three centres: Rawalpindi, Lahore and Multan on November 15, 1998.
In Rawalpindi, the test was held at the old Rawalpindi cricket ground, in which over 2,300 male and female candidates appeared. The IBA officials had claimed that answers of each statement had been fed in the computers, and it would automatically award four marks for each correct answer and deduct one mark for a wrong answer.
The authorities played with the nerves of the candidates and their parents and declared ambiguous and incomplete results on November 17. However, the students rejected the results as there were many blunders in it. The position holders of almost all the Punjab education boards and other students who had secured more than 880 marks in the HSSC exams were declared fail in the test and a majority of them got even less than zero marks. This created unrest among the students and they were forced to come on streets to protest. At one stage, the students even asked the government to stop the admission process.
On the other hand, the IBA was not ready to accept the blunders it had committed. The then IBA chief, Dr Abdul Wahab, in a PTV discussion on November 23, 1998 presented lame excuses for his failure to conduct the test smoothly.
He, however, announced that the photo-copies of answer sheets were being dispatched to each student. Later, when the students got the photo-copies of the answer sheets on November 25, they were happily surprized to see that the IBA had changed the results silently.
An investigation by this scribe later revealed that the answer sheets of the candidates were marked by about 80 IBA students manually who had no knowledge of physics, chemistry and biology, at the residence of Dr Wahab.
In 1999 and 2000, the Punjab government again gave the task to the IBA despite protests by the candidates, parents and even medical college authorities. The IBA controller of examination, Mobeen Khalili, confessed that there was a mismanagement in preparation of the results in 1998 but it was not intentional. The IBA had announced that the answer sheets would be marked manually and results would be declared after 15 days.
Last year too, a large number of candidates, particularly in Lahore and Multan, accused the IBA of selling the question papers. They accused that two private coaching centres in Lahore, allegedly run by former IBA officials, had collected millions of rupees from the candidates and leaked the question paper. The students even took the matter to the Supreme Court.
It is worth mentioning that the IBA this year conducted the test in Sindh but repeated the same blunders and after strong protests by the candidates the provincial authorities had to cancel the results and the IBA was asked to conduct the tests afresh.