UGC chairman M Jagadesh Kumar announced this Monday that the first-ever mandatory standard entrance test for admission to UG programs in all the 45 Central universities would be held in the first week of July. 

The Common University Entrance Test (CUET) is conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA), announcing the test pattern on Tuesday. The Applications for the examination will open in April's first week. Entrance to undergraduate studies in these universities will exclusively be based on the CUET score, and Class 12 Board scores will not hold any importance to the entrance test based admissions. 

Why a standard entrance test?

Many governments have attempted to replace multiple entrance tests with unified entrance exams to lessen the burden on higher education aspirants. This CUET method of admissions is not entirely new to India. It was launched as the Central Universities Common Entrance Test in 2010 under the previous Government. Still, it didn't gather support since only 14 central universities had adopted it. The new model CUET is an upgraded version of CUCET, and it's now compulsory for all 45 major universities to embrace it. This has come after announcing the new National Education Policy (NEP), which advocates the need for an entrance test for university admissions.

he Government did not favour using Board marks for admission because of the "diversity" in evaluation methods. "Some Boards are more generous than others in marking and this gives their students an unfair advantage over others," said an official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Following the CUET, each university will admit students based on a merit list prepared by NTA, and there will be no joint counselling.

Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jamia Millia Islamia and Indira Gandhi National Open University and Aligarh Muslim University and Banaras Hindu University in UP are well-known Central universities that CUET will now cover.

When asked whether Central universities that reserve seats for minorities, such as AMU and Jamia, will also have to adopt CUET, Kumar clarified that the test is compulsory for all 45 Central universities funded by UGC. He added that CUET would not affect the quota of reserved seats at such institutions, but they will have to admit all students through the standard test mandatorily. The reservation policies and ordinances of the universities will remain unchanged. 

CUET will harbour multiple-choice questions based on NCERT textbooks, and students will be scored negatively for incorrect answers. The admission test will have three sections. The CUET 2022 will be offered in 13 languages: Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Urdu, Assamese, and Bengali Punjabi, Odia and English.

The exam is to take place in two shifts. In the first shift, candidates will appear for Section I (languages), two chosen domain subjects and the general test. In the second shift, they will appear for the other four domain subjects and an additional language test if opted.