NEW DELHI: India's second biggest exam, Common University Entrance Test (CUET) UG 2022, began Friday amid confusion, last-minute exam centre change and cancellations.
Many parents and students complained that they got a message about changing centres to distant places a night before the exam. The last-minute scramble led many students to miss out on the debut first phase exam.
While others rued that many questions were not from the CBSE course and were lengthy, others said that too many tests in one day and the annoying travel to far-flung centres left them confused and anxious.
Exams in two centres in New Jalpaiguri and Pathankot were cancelled before the exam started due to technical reasons, said Vineet Joshi, Director General, National Testing Agency, an autonomous agency set up to conduct entrance exams for higher education institutions.
Around 197 candidates in these two centres scheduled to take the test on Friday are now allocated slots in Phase 2, which will start in August, Joshi told this newspaper.
Furious and anxious many CUET candidates and their parents took to social media to express their ordeal. One parent from Gurugram tweeted that his daughter missed the exam because the exam centre was changed at midnight 11.45 and the new centre was 60 km from the previous centre in a different city.
Another student, Bharti, said she was daunted by having to take all five subjects she chose for CUET in one day, while another said she missed the exam as she didn’t check her mail that informed her about exam centre change. "The information came at night and I didn't see it. The changed exam centre was really far-off from the centre I was first alloted. I couldn't reach on time.
Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Friday said that CUET is a step towards quality and standardisation.
“Any remaining challenge in CUET will be resolved soon,” he promised.
But even before the exam had begun, candidates had complained about admit cards being provided just three days before the scheduled exam and also exam centres being far off, even though the University Grants Commission chairperson M. Jagadesh Kumar had promised that 98 percent of students would be given exam centres of their choice.
Envisaged as part of the National Education Policy (NEP), the CUET hopes to curb the problem of high cut-offs and make admission a level playing field for all students.
The exam will be held between July 15 and August 20 in 547 cities within India and 13 cities outside, including Indonesia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, UAE and Kuwait. The second phase will be in August. The last exam is on August 20.
In a computer-based test, the question paper will follow the multiple choice question pattern.
Question papers are divided into three parts. While students have to attempt 40 out of 50 questions in the first two sections, the third requires 60 of 75 questions to be tried.
With 14.9 lakh registrations, CUET is now the second biggest entrance exam surpassing the Joint Entrance Examination-Main’s average registration of nine lakh.
A total of 14,90,000 students have registered for the CUET UG 2022 exams this year, out of which 8,10,000 have been allotted Phase I and 6,80,000 have been taken in Phase II of the CUET-UG 2022 exam
These candidates have applied for 54,555 unique combinations of subjects across 90 universities, including Delhi University and Jamia Millia Islamia.
A total of 44 central universities, 12 state universities, 11 deemed universities, and 19 private universities have applied to participate in the CUET for UG admissions in the 2022-23 academic session.
The exam schedules have been divided into two slots - 9 am to 12.15 pm and 3 pm to 6.45 pm.