The Pakistan Medical Commission (PMC) has extended for 10 days the Medical and Dental Colleges Aptitude Test (MDCAT) registration date to facilitate the students who may be left behind due to recent floods.
At a meeting of the council, the PMC also announced conducting the MDCAT for foreign students in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The PMC said that since very few students were living in other countries and owing to the time difference, it was not possible to set up centres there. It said that details of examination centres for these countries will be uploaded on the PMC website. Those foreign students, residing in other countries other than Saudi Arabia and the UAE, can appear in the MDCAT in Pakistan or in these two countries, whichsoever suited them.
The PMC council meeting also deliberated on the national licencing examination (NLE) and unanimously decided to hold the NLE step-I in the last week of October and NLE step-II in the last week of November for foreign graduates.
The council also decided that the NLE for local students will be conducted through their degree-awarding universities under the umbrella of PMC. It was unanimously decided to reduce the pass percentage of NLE step-I and NLE step-II from 70 per cent to 50 per cent but it will not be applicable retrospectively.
The council decided that the basic postgraduate degrees of the doctors shall be registered with the PMC. However, foreign medical dental postgraduate qualifications shall be scrutinised and registered with the PMC after due process.
The MDCAT will be held on November 13 or November 20 across the country at the same time, and all medical universities of Sindh, Islamabad and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa have agreed that the syllabus will remain the same as the one available on the Pakistan Medical Commission’s (PMC) website.
It said that the Bolan University of Medical and Health Sciences (Balochistan), the University of Health Sciences Lahore, the Khyber Medical University, Peshawar, the Dow University of Health Sciences, Karachi and the Shaheed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto Medical University, Islamabad, will conduct the MDCAT.
It was decided that the pass percentage of MBBS will be 55 per cent and BDS will be 45 per cent. The council relaxed the pass percentage to help adjust students in Pakistani medical dental colleges as last year, almost 20,000 students went abroad to get admissions to foreign medical dental colleges which resulted in a huge financial loss for Pakistan.
It was decided that the MDCAT will be conducted for NUMS separately and only those students can appear who intend to get admission to only these colleges.
The PMC said that the MDCAT will be a paper-based manual exam and answer sheets will be uploaded to the websites of the exam-conducting universities and PMC on the same day.
The council decided that inspections of medical and dental colleges will be carried out by the PMC.
The council unanimously decided to renew doctors’ registration certificates for five years instead of two years and those doctors who are 60-year and above will have to pay 50 per cent of the total fee for the renewal of their registration certificates.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 29th, 2022.
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