With a little over two weeks remaining for the Post-Graduate Medical Entrance Test (PGMET)-2015, officials of the Dr.NTR University of Health Sciences (NTRUHS) are taking all the necessary measures to ensure the conduct of the examination in a fool-proof manner.
The responsibility of conducting the online test has been entrusted to a reputed agency. The university officials are, however, unwilling to disclose the name of the agency though. The agency will be given the question papers by the university a couple of hours before the commencement of the examination in encrypted form through a Virtual Private Network (VPN).
The agency will decrypt the question papers and send them to designated test centres half-an-hour in advance so as to avoid the scope for tampering of the paper. NTRUHS Vice-Chancellor T. Ravi Raju told The Hindu that the servers at the university and systems of the agency would be secured and audited thoroughly. This would ensure fool-proof conduct of the examination.
“The university has gained from the experience of successfully conducting the entrance test for admission to super-specialty courses online in July last year. It will make PGMET-2015 also a smooth affair through online format which makes the job of fraudsters extremely hard. However, a concerted effort is being made to not give scope for slightest chance of manipulation”, Mr. Raju asserted.
Dr.NTRUHS Academic Director G. Krishna Murthy said that there was ample scope for manipulation when PGMET was a written test till last year. It was because of the human interface existing at that time at every stage right from the preparation of question papers, sending them for printing and then transporting them to the test centres much ahead of the examination.
This process used to take at least two months during which attempts could be made to gain illegal access to examination material. It may be recalled that PGMET-2014 dented the image of Dr.NTRUHS due to the question paper leakage that had nationwide ramifications.
The test had to be cancelled and re-examination conducted after an inquiry by the CID exposed major lapses which eventually led to the arrest of some 30 persons including students and middlemen. Officials concerned averred that PGMET-2015 is relatively safe as everything is online.
