No plan to merge NEET, JEE with CUET for next 2 years: Centre
Rajasthan: Amid protests from the students, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Wednesday made a big announcement and said the Centre has no such plans to merge engineering entrance exam JEE and medical entrance exam NEET with the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) for next two years
Giving details, the education minister said the merger of exams is currently only a “concept” and not “decision”, adding that students should not be afraid.
Earlier, University Grants Commission Chairman M Jagadesh Kumar had said JEE and NEET will be merged with the CUET in future.
“Merger of NEET, JEE and CUET is currently a concept, a thought, and the government has not yet decided upon it in principle,” Pradhan said while interacting with students, mostly hailing from his home state Odisha, of Allen Career Institute here during his one-day visit to the city on Tuesday.
“There is no proposal of merging NEET, JEE with CUET and it will take at least two years to decide upon the concept of a merger of the three exams and to conduct a combined test,” he added.
The UGC Chairman had told PTI last month that glitches in CUET-UG will not affect the expansion plans of the crucial exam but the merger will not be “hurried up”.
“As per the NEP, the plan is to have a common entrance exam to reduce the burden on students of appearing in multiple entrances. However, we won’t hurry up to introduce it as we need to plan well. It is a massive exercise and our focus is on planning and taking forward from the lessons we have learnt while conducting CUET,” Jagadesh had said.
“The commission will set up an expert committee which will study all important entrance exams being conducted in the country as well as abroad. If we have to introduce the exam next year, the preparation has to start now considering the massive exercise and the different disciplines involved,” Kumar had said.
It must be noted that the debut edition of CUET-UG started in July and has been marred with glitches prompting the National Testing Agency (NTA) to cancel exams at multiple centres.
With 14.9 lakh registrations, the CUET, the common gateway for undergraduate admissions in all central universities, is now the second biggest entrance exam in the country, surpassing JEE-Main’s average registration of nine lakh.
