On Monday, March 21, Prof M Jagadesh Kumar, Chairman, University Grants Commission (UGC), had announced that all the central universities funded by the UGC will have to conduct admissions to their undergraduate courses via the Common University Entrance Test (CUET). It's April 2 already and the registration for the CUET begins today.
In today's edition of What The FAQ, we jog your memory about the announcement itself and take you through the registration process too.
The announcement was made a few days ago, a refresher first?
Prof M Jagadesh Kumar, Chairman, UGC, had announced that all the 45 centrally-funded universities will admit students based on CUET which will be conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA). There will be no weightage for Class XII marks. Since there will be no common centralised counselling for admissions, unlike the system in place for exams like NEET or JEE, this automatically means that students can apply to any number of universities for admission and the universities will have to employ multiple cycles of admission to fill the seats. The CUET question paper will be based on the NCERT Class XII syllabus.
So, how does one register?
The application will go live soon on the official website cuet.samarth.ac.in. You can also keep an eye on NTA's official website nta.ac.in for more information.
The application form will be available till April 30, 2022.
How will the CUET be conducted and when?
CUET will be Computer Based Test (CBT) and will be conducted in namely Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati, Odiya, Bengali, Assamese, Punjabi, English, Hindi and Urdu. Also, candidates can pick from 19 other languages like French, German, Japanese, Russian, Bodo and more. Though no date has been announced, the exam will be conducted in the month of July 2022.
What will be the exam pattern of CUET?
The exam is divided into three sections. The CUET has two different language sections. As per The Indian Express, Section IA is a 45-minutes long compulsory section designed to check your English skills and that of one Indian language as well. Section IB is for those students aspiring to gain admission into UG programmes for foreign languages. Section II will test the core understanding of subjects the student hopes to pursue at UG. Forty five minutes are allotted to solve 40 questions from a choice of 50. Students can pick six out of the 27 subjects like Business Studies, Chemistry, Home Science and so on. Section III is also about testing the general knowledge of the student. Not a compulsory section, this is to be attempted by those students whose UG programmes demand such an assessment. They will be given an hour to attempt 60 out of 75 questions.
Anything else one needs to know?
If any university allows students who have cleared Class XII in recent years to take admission in the 2022 session, they can attempt the exam, as announced by the UGC. Students only need to refer to Class XII NCERT books for preparation.
