The Indian government is taking the initiative to merge the two most important entrance examinations. Will this move be revolutionary, or just another failed attempt to modernize the education?

This is not a new examination but just an existing examination, Common University Entrance Test (CUET) that will confine the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) and National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET). University Grants Commission (UGC) chairperson M Jagadesh Kumar said on Friday that the government was looking at introducing the integrated entrance exam at the earliest, preferably by next year.

CUET being launched this year offers undergraduate admissions to 90 universities including 45 central universities. Responsible personnel mentioned 1.05 million students applied for CUET, making it the second biggest exam after NEET which received 1.8 million applications. Aiming to reduce the students’ burden, Kumar said, ‘one nation, one entrance’.

“NEET requires biology, physics and chemistry, JEE requires mathematics, physics and chemistry. All these subjects are already in CUET. Therefore, it won’t be an issue for medical and engineering colleges to use CUET scores for admission,” the UGC chairperson said.

Kumar showed concern toward the near running exam dates and said that they won’t make sudden changes, “We don’t want to announce anything in a sudden manner just a few months before the exams” (Kumar).

Experts from various fields would formulate a team and work in progress to make the examination much more viable and feasible. “The committee will work on preparing recommendations for an integrated entrance exam. These recommendations will then be shared with the stakeholders for consultation and feedback and based on that the ministry and UGC will decide the modalities of the exam. A lot of planning has to be done,” Kumar said.

There are possibilities of the examination being conducted twice a year, hence, giving students much better opportunities to bring their best performances to the front. Kumar also said, “We are also discussing if the NTA can come up with its own entrance examination centres in educational institutions across the country that can accommodate more than 300 to 400 students at a time. These centres can be used by educational institutions for the rest of the year,”.

In spite of all the similarities that align with his new examination CUET, the only wall that stands is the fact that the NEET examination is till on paper format and not over a computer based platform. Kumar said, “The question papers of all these entrance exams are strictly based on NCERT syllabus and are in multiple-choice format. NTA uses the same criteria for selecting experts for preparing these question papers. The only difference will be in the case of NEET, which is still OMR-based and not computer-based. Therefore, introducing a common entrance exam will be good both from a logistical point of view and the interest of the students.”

One of the involved NTA officials also mentioned, “Once a committee is formed and it submits its recommendations, NTA will start preparing for the integrated exam.”

The only wait now is to actually see how this excellent initiative runs out in future and whether it will prove itself to be amiable to the hardworking students.