PMC defends medical admission tests

The Pakistan Medical Council (PMC) has defended the Medical and Dental College Admission Test (MDCAT) held on Nov 30 simultaneously in all provinces and claimed that it has largely addressed concerns of the students who sat in the test to get admission in MBBS and BDS programmes.

Speaking at a press conference in Islamabad on Wednesday, PMC President Dr Arshad Taqi and Vice President Ali Raza admitted that students faced many problems during the test but claimed that the PMC had later contacted more than 700 such candidates and cleared their misunderstandings.

“The scoring process was free from human interference. We gave the candidates the option of rechecking. Under the agreement, 15 roll numbers were re-checked.

“Some children had erred while marking their batch number. When they realized the mistake, they tried to undo it but the machine pointed out the error which caused some misunderstanding,” Dr Taqi said.

He said the scoring was done on the basis of what was written in the paper. “When we designed the exam, we gave details on the website regarding the format of the questions.”

Vice President Raza said there are 19,120 MBBS and BDS seats in the country and 3 candidates compete for each seat that is why not every aspirant can go to a medical college.  It is about merit, he said.

The PMC officials addressed the press conference two days after the PPP led Sindh government rejected the MDCAT results, citing massive discrepancies.

Addressing a joint press conference on Monday, Sindh provincial ministers demanded of the federal government to hand over the authority of conducting the test to the provincial government.

Sindh Minister for Health Dr Azra Pechuho said around 150,000 candidates suffered all over Pakistan because of major errors in conducting the tests and the PMC choosing irrelevant questions in the paper.

"Soon after the results were declared, candidates started crying because of the massive scale of mistakes in the data. Suddenly, the authorities undisclosed the result and even then did not provide an answer key for the candidates," Dr Pechuho added.

Talking to The Express Tribune, social rights activist Jibran Nasir had said the Sindh High Court (SHC) had bound the PMC to make a national uniform syllabus before conducting MDCAT at an all Pakistan level.

"This never happened [though], and tests were conducted, including questions that had never been part of the syllabus in all the provinces," said Nasir, who has been representing the candidates at the SHC.

"During the court hearing even PMC officials confessed that out of total 200 questions in the test, there were 14 ambiguous questions – that is around seven percent of the questions."

Talking with reference to the issue, the PMC vice president said there were 158 questions in which good students got good marks and weak students got low marks.

“In view of a detailed review and student feedback, the 14 questions will not be considered and numbers will be given out of 186 questions. Work is under way in phases on applications received from students for recounting marks,” he said.

He claimed that the PMC knew who was behind the protests against test results. “Their business is closed. A question bank was developed by the academies and children rote memorized those questions to pass the test. We are satisfied with 67,000 students who passed the test,” he added.

Meanwhile, the Pakistan Medical Association Sindh Chapter has once again rejected MDCAT conducted by the PMC. At a press conference in Hyderabad, the PMA general secretary demanded transfer of the authority for conducting the entry tests for the medical universities to the provinces.

WITH INPUT FROM NEWS DESK