New Delhi: A total of 32 higher education institutions including Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Uttar Pradesh’s Banaras Hindu University (BHU) have decided to admit students to their postgraduate courses through the Common University Entrance Test (CUET), ThePrint has learnt.
While Delhi University (DU), Jamila Milia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University will use the CUET for admissions to their undergraduate (UG) programmes, they have decided not to opt for the entrance test when it comes to post-graduate (PG) courses this year.
DU has said that it decided not to adopt the CUET PG this year because the test, while mandatory for UG admissions, is not so for PG admissions.
According to University Grants Commission (UGC) Chairman M. Jagadesh Kumar, the list of 32 universities that will be using the CUET to conduct PG admissions also includes the University of Hyderabad, the central universities of Gujarat, Haryana, South Bihar, Kerala, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh, Manipur University, Sikkim University, and Tezpur University among others.
“We are expecting more universities to join the list in the future,” he told ThePrint.
The CUET was announced in March this year as a single window for admissions to undergraduate programmes in central universities across the country. Since then, many other non-central universities have also decided to adopt the test.
The UGC, the country’s highest statutory body for higher education, had last week announced that admissions to PG courses will also be done through CUET from this year onwards.
Entrance tests for postgraduate courses will take place in the last week of July, and will be conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA), which is also conducting the CUET UG exam.
Use of CUET for undergraduate admissions had begun in March.
‘Overwhelming response’ to CUET from UG applicants
Earlier this week, UGC chairman Kumar had tweeted that till May 23, a record 11.51 lakh candidates had registered for the CUET UG exam since the registration window for the test was opened on 2 April, and around 9.13 lakh had paid the application fees.
He added that “many of the students who applied are from remote and rural areas”.
Kumar also said that students will now be able to get into the best universities without the “burden of scoring very high marks in the range of 99 to 100%” in their school board exams.
“For students who could not get high board scores, earlier it was not possible to get admission in top universities. But now it is within reach,” he tweeted.
“The participation of a large number of universities too is very encouraging. In the coming years, more universities are expected to adopt CUET. With the possibility that CUET will be conducted twice in a year, this will further help the students plan and attempt CUET,” he further wrote.
Kumar had told ThePrint in an interview last month that the UGC was working on extending the CUET to postgraduate programmes offered by central universities after the “overwhelming response” it received from educational institutions regarding use of the test for UG courses.
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)
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