Over half-a-lakh students competed for 150 seats at the entrance examination to the first year MBBS course 2014-15 of the Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research (Jipmer) on Sunday.
Though an estimated 93,000 students, which was 35 per cent more than the previous year, had registered for the examination, the actual attendees were only about 62 per cent.
This was partly because Jipmer’s test comes after a series of entrance examinations by several other prestigious institutions such as AIMS, Delhi and CMC, Vellore. The test also clashed with the entrance examination to BITS, Pilani. The test was conducted fully in online mode from 10 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. Jipmer had adopted a pattern followed for entrance examinations to engineering-medical courses on an all India basis.
The examinations were held for 200 marks — English 20, physics 60, chemistry 60 and biology 60.
The Jipmer management had put in place elaborate arrangements to conduct the examination across 376 test venues at 36 cities across the country. The test centres were spread over seven cities in north zone, 17 cities in south zone, eight cities in east zone and four cities in west zone.
In Puducherry region, 1,631 candidates appeared for the test across nine examination centres registering the highest attendance percentage among registrants of 85 per cent.
“A seven-member committee has been tasked with completing the centralised evaluation over the week. The results will be notified by June 14,” said S. Mahadevan, Dean (Academics), Jipmer.
The pool of 150 seats includes quotas of five seats for overseas candidates and 40 seats for candidates from Puducherry.