YET ANOTHER FILTER

After CUET UG, the UGC has come up with CUET PG. Are these common entrance tests a way to filter out some types of students from central varsities and target the cosmopolitan mix there?

- Vikram Kilpady

IF you are one of those parents who suffer sleepless nights due to the high percentages in Class 10 and Class 12 needed for your ward to make it to college and he/she is coasting elsewhere, the Common University Entrance Test Under Graduate (CUET UG) may offer some relief. Many generations of parents and children have suffered the trauma of going through the mindbender of high school and adolescence as the rest of the world, armed with Olympiads and mindfulness and what-not, goes gungho at NEETs of many kinds.

The CUET UG could be a magic shield to get into college without high Class 12 scores. The University Grants Commission chairman, Jagadesh Kumar, has said that these test scores will matter and not Class 12 marks. While the CUET UG may look like a stress-releasing exercise, the addition of one more filter is not entirely free of doublespeak. What is more perplexing is the introduction of a CUET for postgraduate courses.

Various central universities already had their own entrance tests like the tough-to-crack Jawaharlal Nehru University one. Aligarh Muslim University and other central universities too had their own tests. It is in this context that the CUET PG sounds superfluous.

Many non-central universities also have entrance tests for post-graduation admission. Like Osmania University. If for instance, a student from a non-central university, like the University of Madras, passes BA and wants to do PG, he will be selected on the basis of those marks. If he wishes to do his PG at JNU, AMU, or any other central university, he could have written their entrance test. But now under the new dispensation, he need not apply to every central university for its respective test; CUET PG will be the all-university pass.