MCI moots common All-India entrance test for MBBS

The Medical Council of India has recommended the holding of a Common National Entrance Examination, to cover admissions to all medical institutions across the country. This includes institutes and deemed universities managed by central government, state government, public sector undertakings, local self governments, trusts, charitable societies and other organisations.

Taking note of the numerous entrance examinations that have cropped over the past few years, the MCI’s move is meant to ease the burden of both students and parents. The recommendations of the MCI are based on the report of the two member subcommittee, comprising of Dr Ved Prakash Mishra and Dr CV Bhirmananandham, who were asked to look into setting up a common entrance scheme following complaints. The subcommittee, says in its report:

This (multiple entrance exams) also involves hardship of various kinds including travelling to far-off places, overlapping dates, insufficient time gap between different entrance exams being held at different places, the money spent on travelling and for fee etc. For participating in the entrance examinations and various other incidental expenses.

Under the proposal, there will be one common entrance test held all over the country, which will be conducted in English and all the languages recognised by the Indian constitution. An authority will be identified by the central government for conducting the examination and deciding the syllabus. Further, the current exemption of holding entrance examinations in states with only one board (CBSE, ICSE, or state board) will be discontinued. The proposed single entrance examination will be evaluated in a computerized mechanism to get rid of the human/manual element in the evaliation process.

As per the MCI proposal, the single entrance examination will not translate into a single counselling process for the entire country. The MCI has decided that there would be an arrangement whereby students eligible in different states would be segregated from the total list of candidates, which will be then utilized by the state authorities to admit students based on their admission criteria.

Details of the committee report are available here (Page 19 onwards)

An editorial in the Indian express, titled ‘The one-test solution’ says:

The examination suggested would cover 290 institutes of medical education; and the benefits of such a move are obvious. Currently a candidate hoping to get into medical school has to sit for an exhaustingly large number of examinations, with different schools often requiring different tests. The 50-odd seats at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences alone are fought over by more than 60,000 applicants. Those rejected by AIIMS will take a host of other exams. For them, the process is both stressful and messy. A proposal to streamline it is therefore welcome, signalling that the MCI, which is the regulatory body for medical examinations, is alert to the problems faced by students.

But this concern must be reflected in the blueprint for the actualisation of the MCI proposals. The council does not indicate who will design and conduct the single test; reportedly, that is left to the government to decide. But in the past, some state-run examinations have been of variable reliability. Not all state-level common entrance tests in engineering, for example, can compare with the IITs’ Joint Entrance Examination. The proposed single medical examination must be informed by this experience. This is why one mandated medical examination may be too ambitious to achieve in one go. Why not aspire to an examination that is one of many benchmarks? That would have the additional
benefit of preserving institutional autonomy. Elsewhere in the world, such systems exist; in the US, for example, colleges rely on a standardised test for each level, but also on a host of other indicators (school grades and extra-curriculars are usual), that vary from institution to institution. Surely, these different combinations can all be “fair”. As they stand now, the MCI proposals are one-size-fits-all and don’t leave that option open: they state that admission to all MBBS courses must be strictly, and solely, based on the common entrance examination.

The real test of the MCI’s good intentions will be the actual system of assessment they yield. Will this move be eventually followed by a common board-exam like pattern for MBBS examinations as well to ensure uniformity and improvement of teaching quality, I wonder?