The State government is gearing up to conduct the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) for undergraduate medical courses adhering to a Supreme Court directive. The common national entrance exam will be held in May next year.
In a meeting here on Thursday, called by Medical Education Minister S.A. Ramdas, it was resolved to request the Council of Boards of School Education in India (COBSE), New Delhi, to allow the State to conduct the examination in both English and Kannada.
Siddaiah, Principal Secretary, Higher Education, K.S. Prabhakar, Secretary, Medical Education, and Chakravarthi Mohan, Executive Director, Karnataka Examinations Authority (KEA), attended the meeting.
Resolutions
During the proceedings, which are now in the public domain, it was decided that a Kannada version of the question paper will have to be made available. Sources said that the State will write to the COBSE seeking the difficulty level of the questions to be similar to the Common Entrance Test (CET) conducted by the Karnataka Examinations Authority (KEA) until this year.
“It was noted that there is still a difference in the curriculum between CBSE and the State syllabus. Instructions have been given to KEA to go ahead with tele-teaching, website programming, conduct of mock test and utilising the services of expert teachers to bridge the gap in the syllabus,” the press note added.
Counselling
The officials also decided that though the examination will be conducted by the CBSE, counselling will be done for Karnataka students as per the reservation policy of the State.
During the meeting, it was decided that instead of the three centres identified in the State initially — Bangalore, Mangalore and Hubli, there will be seven centres to make it convenient for students. The new centres will be Mysore, Gulbarga, Belgaum and Shimoga.
