Eight medical students from Madras Medical College, Stanley Medical College and Kilpauk Medical College met health minister, V.S. Vijay on Friday morning to submit a petition.
The health minister forwarded the students’ letter to the governing council (GC) of the Tamil Nadu Dr. MGR Medical University, which then held a meeting in the evening to determine upon a course of action.
The council comprises the law secretary, director of medical education and health secretary among others, and is headed by the Vice Chancellor of the university.
“I have forwarded the matter to the GC. They will take it up and the matter will be dealt with sympathetically,” said Dr. Vijay.
According to sources, the students’ demands were deliberated upon at the meeting, along with the regulations proposed by the Medical Council of India.
Six students from MMC, one from Stanley and one from KMC had met Dr. Vijay and placed a list of five demands.
Apart from their complaints about the elevated standards of evaluation proposed by the university’s V-C, they asked for the removal of the six-month break system that does not allow a student to attend classes of the following year until they clear all their papers.
The students also demanded the doing away with the mandatory 90 per cent attendance requirement.
They also wanted a re-evaluation and re-totalling of their marksheets and breaks between examinations.
An upgraded evaluation system was put in place by the university recently, in which a student had to pass in every paper in order to pass a year, instead of a obtaining a cumulative average across papers.
The students of all three government medical colleges, had planned to hold a demonstration on Friday afternoon.
But after their meeting with the health minister, the protest was cancelled.
“The minister has promised us that our demands will be addressed. So he asked us to call off the protest,” said M. Kamaraj, a trainee surgeon at MMC.
