Seat racket: Can Karnataka Examination Authority’s ‘original’ idea stop it?

Bengaluru: Seat blocking is one of the biggest menaces in the medical education field. In the absence of a stringent law, seat blocking/dropping out has become very much common.

Blocking the government quota medical seats in private colleges was resulting in the loss of precious seats to the meritorious students. But a decision taken by the Karnataka Examination Authority (KEA) over retaining of the original documents has stopped this menace to a large extent in the medical post graduate admission process.

Following rampant complaints of corruption in the medical Post Graduate Entrance Test (PGET) conducted by the Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences (RGUHS) since the last two years, the state government has handed over the responsibility of holding the PGET to the National Board of Examination (NBE).  

Following complaints that tens of students were blocking the post graduate government quota seats in private colleges, the KEA took stringent measures. Such measures are now bearing fruit.

According to KEA officials, for the last two years the state government had handed over the responsibility of seat allocation for the PG seat aspirants who had cleared the PGET conducted by the NBE to a competent authority. Following complaints of seat blocking, the authority has now adopted a new procedure which stops the candidates from blocking seats.

Under the new arrangements a student who gets a PG seat through the KEA must surrender his original documents to the KEA. Instead of a spot document verification and handing back of the original documents to the candidates, the KEA is now retaining them for weeks and holds the verification along with the RGUHS officials till the last date of the PG admission process. If any candidate wants the originals back they need to surrender the allotted PG seats back to the KEA.

Speaking to this newspaper, an officer informed that as the KEA retains the originals, the candidates can't go and select seats in some other institute and block the government quota seats under RGUHS.

"Originals are necessary everywhere. So our move succeeded in containing the menace of seat blocking to a large extent," he said.

COMEDK entrance test tomorrow

The two most anticipated admissions tests for undergraduate professional courses in the state, COMEDK and CET, will be held next week. While COMEDK will hold its admission test for under-graduate courses offered at its affiliated colleges on Sunday, the Karnataka Examination Authority (KEA) will hold the Common Entrance Test (CET) for courses offered by various government colleges and government quota seats available in the private professional colleges on May 12 and 13.

KEA Executive Director Sushma Godbole said a total of 1.57 lakh students would appear for the CET examination, which will be held in 343 examination centres.

Among them 73 will be in Bengaluru city. Result on May 26: Sushma said that CET exams were originally scheduled to be held on April 29 and 30, but had to be postponed due to transport bandh. However the results will be announced in May 26 as scheduled.