UGC chief Jagadesh Kumar defends CUET’s MCQ format: Being used for long, no complaint yet

Speaking with The Indian Express about the recent criticism of the MCQ format of the Central University Entrance Test (CUET), Kumar said 12 central universities have been conducting admissions through CUCET since 2010, using OMR-based MCQ-type questions in two parts.

“Part-A tests language, general awareness, mathematical aptitude and analytical skills, and Part-B tests domain knowledge,” he said. “CUCET was conducted in all disciplines for undergraduate (UG) and postgraduate (PG) programmes. In 2021, the NTA [National Testing Agency] conducted CUCET for these 12 universities as a computer-based MCQ test. Since 2022, they have all joined the rest of the central universities in adopting CUET both for UG and PG programmes.”

He said, “Conducting MCQ-based tests in different disciplines is not new. Such MCQ-based entrance tests are more than a decade old in many central universities. None of these universities has reported any problem related to the quality of students admitted.”

In a recent Idea Exchange session with The Indian Express, JNU vice-chancellor Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit had expressed concern that CUET’s MCQ format for PG admissions will impact the quality of student intake.

She had said: “In Master’s (programme), you cannot have admissions based on MCQs because we don’t even know whether the student can write anything… There should be qualitative answering and testing of other abilities rather than rote memory… This is a limitation…could raise issues with the kind of students we’ll get. Many of them may not even understand the language and problems of communication.”

Kumar stated that there is no “ideal entrance test” but machine-driven evaluation is the best possible option to maintain objectivity in large-scale testing for admissions.

“Academic debate on whether MCQ-type questions are good in entrance tests for admissions is very old,” the UGC chairman said. “There is nothing like an ideal entrance test. When a small number of students sit for an entrance test, written short or long answers are fine. Answer scripts can be checked and rechecked for uniformity of marking, as we used to do long ago in JEE written answer scripts.

“However, now the number of students who write these tests is significantly large — it is already near 1.5 million and in the coming years will become several millions. Under these circumstances, the need to bring objectivity in the admission process and make it bias- and discrimination-free is very high.”

Admissions have become “very competitive and we cannot let human incapacity to be neutral due to fatigue affect the marking”, Kumar said. “A small variation in marking can change the prospects of a student. That is why machine-driven evaluation, without human involvement, is the possible option,” he said. “Not only in our country, elsewhere, too, this is in practice when the number of students who write these tests are large.”

On Tuesday, to a question on the JNU V-C’s remarks that CUET’s multiple choice format was not suited for postgraduate admissions, NTA director-general Vineet Joshi said, “There is a designated committee that guides NTA on the exam pattern. Suggestions are always taken up and discussed before making any final decision. But every system has its pros and cons. Conducting subjective-type exams creates discrepancies during the evaluation process.”

“It has been experienced in the past with NEET and UGC-NET, which were earlier conducted in the subjective mode but were then changed into the MCQ-based format,” Joshi said.