Students who wrote the Common Entrance Test for diploma holders (D-CET) in the State on Sunday faced a googly — they had to answer the same set of questions that the previous batch of test-takers did.
With all the 180 multiple-choice questions being the same as last year’s (2012 D-CET), the Technical Students’ Federation (TSF) is now demanding a re-examination.
“It’s a major goof-up,” said B.V. Ramesh Gowda, State president of the TSF, which exposed the Karnataka Examinations Authority’s (KEA) ‘gaffe’.
“As a result of the KEA’s mistake, deserving students have been cheated. We are going to meet KEA officials on Monday and demand a re-exam,” he said.
Comparing the question papers of 2012 and the one given to the students on Sunday, Mr. Gowda said the only difference between the two papers was in the serial numbers of the questions.
For example, questions one to five in the 2012 exam had become seven to 11 in this year’s paper. In fact, even the diagrams given in the two papers were the same, and so were the four options.
Bindu Shree, a seat aspirant, said most of the questions had been repeated from the previous year’s paper.
The entrance test determines admission through the lateral entry scheme into the second/third semester engineering courses.
A KEA release said that 87.39 per cent attendance was recorded for the D-CET for which around 27,000 had applied.
Last year too
There were several controversies that dogged the D-CET last year too. First, there was an uproar over the test being conducted, as candidates argued that the All-India Council for Technical Education handbook didn’t allow for a test. Then, when the test was finally conducted, students alleged that questions worth at least 50 marks were not from the syllabus.
KEA clueless
Meanwhile, KEA officials claimed to know nothing about the faux paus . “I don’t think so (that the two question papers are the same),” a senior KEA official told The Hindu , when asked about the questions being repeated. On the probability of a re-exam, the official said: “We will have to see if it [repetition] is true and then decide.”
