Shillong, Mar 6: The Director of Higher and Technical Education today assured that all Meghalaya students sitting the Common University Entrance Test – Postgraduate (CUET-PG) will be assigned test venues within the North East.
For the March 6-7 examination dates, all Meghalaya test takers have been assigned centres within the state. For March 8-10, there has been a “significant movement” of candidates from centres outside the state to within Meghalaya. For subsequent test dates, “no [Meghalaya] candidate will have to travel outside the North East region to appear in the examination,” the Director said in a press release today.
Last year there was considerable angst among students as many had been allocated centres in far-flung parts of the country in the CUET Undergraduate exams. There has been criticism again this year about students not getting their preferred examination centre.
This year, the state’s Department of Education has increased the number of computer nodes so that candidates from Meghalaya need not have to travel outside the state, or at least outside the North East even though the number of students looking to sit these exams increases year on year.
However, when there is a large number of students sitting one particular exam, it becomes impossible to accommodate all of them at their preferred centre, and “the only available option is to allow for a second or a third option which a candidate willingly exercises are per rules and regulations of NTA (National Testing Agency).”
The government is in the process of setting up an additional 450 compatible computer nodes along with related infrastructure as required by the NTA for commissioning of computer-based test centres at government educational institutions. The additional 450 systems to be made available along with the existing computer nodes already available will ensure that candidates of Meghalaya will not have to travel outside the State for the CUET-UG examinations scheduled to be held in June.
