The Pakistan Medical Commission (PMC) has decided to conduct the Medical and Dental Colleges Admission Test (MDCAT) as scheduled.
It has ruled that all the results will be subject to the post-exam analysis, and the required corrections will be made after rechecking.
The Medical & Dental Council of the Pakistan Medical Commission made this decision in a meeting on the MDCAT 2021 held by the President of the PMC with a delegation of students last week. It also concluded that the MDCAT “is being conducted strictly as per the syllabus and the structure prepared by the National Medical & Dental Academic Board”.
It added that “the exam system is functioning properly and the interim results are correct, subject to the post-exam analysis and the final results to be issued thereafter”.
The council addressed the students’ concerns regarding internet issues and said that the notion is misconceived because the examination system at each center is designed to operate on a wireless local area network (LAN). It clarified that “all the final answers submitted by each student at the end of the exam are uploaded to the server at each exam center through the LAN securely without exception”.
The council explained that “the up-to-date data for questions marked as skipped or not attempted by all students up to date was examined. Only 0.13pc of the total answers submitted by over 140,000 students who have already taken the exam was marked as skipped or not attempted”.
“In effect, only one skipped or not attempted question showed up for every five students on average. Therefore, the concern that skipped questions attempted later or edited answers are not being uploaded to the system and scored is not correct,” it added.
The council also reassured the delegation that the post-exam analysis will be carried out in alignment with international standards by a team of experts, and that the results would be made public.
It also guaranteed that the questions found to be contrary to the principles of the MDCAT for being vague or discriminatory would be removed, and a candidate who attempts a removed question will be given full marks for it.
