Implementation of Centralized Admission Policy Still Remains Ambivalent

KARACHI: Earlier, the concerned authorities of Pakistan’s medical education system, decided to formulate a ‘centralized admission policy,’ which consisted of a centralized test for admissions into medical and dental colleges, respectively.

Up till now, the authorities from Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC) haven’t been able to devise a uniform admission strategy for admissions in government and private medical and dental colleges of Sindh, due to which there is a high possibility for the private medical and dental institutions to arrange their own admission tests, based on their own terms.

This new policy was planned in order to conduct a centralized exam followed by merit based score divisions, for all students aspiring to pursue medicine and dentistry, and whichever students scored high marks in the test would be given admission in government institutions, while those with lesser merit score would get admitted in private medical and dental colleges.

Due to the strategy of announcing test dates prior to government institutes, the private colleges gather more students and charge heavy admission fees, which is non refundable. Many students who clear tests of private colleges take tentative admissions, to continue their education, in case if they fail to get admission in government institutes. Upon clearing government colleges’ test, these students face financial loss due to the no-refund policy.

Although, this issue hasn’t been resolved by the authorities, but they seem to be taking measures to protect parents from exploitation by private colleges, on the name of admission fees.

Sources from PMDC informed that, this year, private colleges may be barred from holding examination tests for MBBS and BDS programs, before the test for government colleges.

In the meantime, the Provincial Health Department has assigned the responsibility for admissions in government medical colleges for the year 2018-19 to Jinnah Sindh Medical University (JSMU).

Vice-Chancellor JSMU, Dr. Tariq Rafi discussed that, the results of Intermediate Pre-medical group will be announced around September 15th 2018, and that admissions process for MBBS and BDS program shall only be initiated after the announcement of Intermediate results.