BENGALURU: The Karnataka state government is fully equipped to conduct an internal and state-wide entrance examination for medical students as opposed to the centralised National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA), maintains Minister for Medical Education Dr. Sharanprakash Patil. Speaking to TNIE, the minister reaffirmed his confidence in the state government’s testing infrastructure, specifically the Common Entrance Test (CET) conducted by the Karnataka Examinations Authority (KEA).
“Karnataka has been a leader in conducting entrance examinations at the state level, in general. The CET system, which works on the basis of transparency, was established long back during Veerappa Moily’s administration. We have the expertise to conduct exams without any hazards,” Patil stressed.
According to Patil, the state government has been prescient in its standardisation of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) curriculum, which is why the state’s medical students would face no trouble in switching from NEET to CET, with the former being based on CBSE syllabi.
“The National Medical Commission (NMC) sets the scope of NEET, based on CBSE syllabi, and the state government has had the foresight to implement CBSE across Karnataka’s pre-university (PU) colleges. So if the NMC asks us to adhere to its prescribed syllabus, while conducting a state-level entrance examination, that will not be a problem at all. There will not be any conflict,” said Patil.
Questioning the NTA and the union government’s transparency, Patil claimed that there have generally not been complaints about the state government’s execution of examinations, and the few that have arisen in the past have been anomalous incidents.
“It depends on the intent of the government. If any government wants to conduct examinations transparently, it is capable of doing it. Mistakes can happen occasionally; but it can’t happen every time, can it? If the government is not interested in correcting leaks, they will keep happening,” Patil said, chastising the union government for not only being “incompetent”, but also completely opaque in its conduction of the NEET.