Mumbai, June 22 (PTI) The MHT-CET entrance examination of the Maharashtra government for engineering and other professional courses was conducted in a fully transparent manner and all the issues raised by students have been resolved, a top official said on Saturday.
Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Aaditya Thackeray has questioned the way the Maharashtra Health and Technical Common Entrance Test (MHT-CET, commonly known as MH-CET) was conducted this year, asking, among other things, that marks obtained by students be declared instead of their percentiles.
Thackeray on Saturday also met Governor Ramesh Bais and sought his intervention in the “chaos” in the MHT-CET.
Dilip Sardesai, commissioner of MHT-CET, however, claimed at a press conference that all objections were addressed.
Maharashtra was the first state to conduct the admission process for professional courses in a computerised and centralised manner, and the method was later adopted by the Union government as it is transparent and free of human intervention, Sardesai said.
Notably, complaints about the CET have come amid the raging controversy surrounding the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) for medical colleges and the scrapped UGC-NET.
“The state common entrance examination cell conducted the MHT -CET 2024 entrance examination for engineering, pharmacy and agriculture courses between April 22 and 30 (Physics-Chemistry-Biology group) and from May 2 to 16 (Physics-Chemistry-Mathematics group). The examinations were conducted at 169 centres,” Sardesai said.
As many as 6,75,377 students appeared for MHT-CET, there was no negative marking for incorrect answers, no student received grace marks, and the results were declared using the percentile method, he added.
“Online facility was provided for registering objections. These objections were verified by subject experts and, accordingly, answer sheets were modified,” Sardesai said.
The result process was implemented after incorporating revised answer sheets as per the suggestions of subject experts, he said, adding the marks obtained by candidates were declared according to the formula of the result process, and session- wise results were declared in the form of percentile.
The candidate who had equal marks, also called ‘raw score’, in a single session obtained equal percentile, he said.
“Similarly, the tests were conducted on different days in two sessions each, so the ‘raw score’ related to various sessions and the percentile of the candidates are different. The objection that the candidates did not get the marks they scored as per the answer sheets made available to them is also incorrect,” he said.
Another objection was that the question papers for each batch are different (with varying levels of difficulty), but the result of each session is calculated independently, the official said.
The examinations are held in different batches but a single merit list is declared, Sardesai said.
“This procedure had been made available on the website of CET cell. It was published in April 2024 well in advance before the commencement of the examination,” he said.
About 200 candidates and parents had submitted objections with the CET cell, and all these objections were addressed, Sardesai said.
A total of 54 candidates, whose objections were accepted for consideration, were refunded the amount deposited by them using online mode in their bank accounts, he said.
“The results of the examinations are declared batch-wise for providing equal opportunity to all the candidates in each and every session, and this examination pattern has been implemented since 2018-19,” Sardesai said. PTI MR BNM KRK
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