The Common University Entrance Test to Central universities has been riddled with technical glitches, leading to criticism from students and universities about the format and the delay in the admission process. UGC Chairman M. Jagadesh Kumar says these were logistical issues that will be handled better next time. Excerpts:
Universities are concerned about the delay in the admission process due to the CUET schedule as well as technical glitches and cancellations during the examination conducted for undergraduate courses. How are you addressing those issues?
The academic sessions are delayed because of COVID, and we are trying to go back to the original academic session slowly. As far as CUET [Common University Entrance Test] is concerned, if I was a student I would expect the centre to be glitch-free so that I can focus on the exam and no other factors that pop up, which happened in several cases. But look at the scale of the exam: it is one of the largest entrance tests with 14.9 lakh students, which is next only to NEET. But NEET and JEE are conducted over a three-day window and the number of subjects are also limited. But here we have 27 domain and 20 language subjects, 12 Indian language subjects also and one general paper. The main challenge is identifying centres with working computers and Internet connection. Based on the experience and lessons we have learnt, we are confident that in the coming year there would be no glitches. Though we assign test centres to students only after checking the computer system during a mock drill, in some cases the computers failed on the day of the exam. That is why we gave students a window between August 25 to August 30. We sent information to students through SMS, voice mail and email if we were cancelling an exam at a centre, but some students might have not seen those messages and found the centre closed on the day of the exam. These are logistic issues, which can be resolved through proper planning and the lessons we are learning from the experience.
