PMC announces to hold MDCAT 2020 on November 29

The Medical and Dental College Admission Test (MDCAT) 2020 will be conducted on November 29, the Pakistan Medical Council announced on Wednesday.

"Upon compliance with the directions of the Honourable Sindh High Court, the National MDCAT will be held on 29th November, 2020," said the PMC.

The development comes a week after the Sindh High Court had stopped the PMC from conducting the MDCAT 2020 that was scheduled for November 15.

The SHC had halted the exam till the formation of an academic board and authority.

The SHC, in its order, underlined that since the National Medical & Dental Academic Board had not been formed under the Pakistan Medical Commission Act, 2020, the "MDCAT cannot be conducted".

According to the court ruling, the Board will have "the powers to formulate the examination structure and standards for the MDCAT for approval of the Council".

The SHC further criticised a notification issued October 23, 2020, by the PMC regarding the syllabus, in which it said candidates would have the option to mark any questions they believed were beyond the syllabus in an objection form to be provided at the examination center, saying it "created uncertainty and gross confusion and perplexity in the minds of all applicants" and terming it "unreasonable and nonstandard".

"This is quite a unique idea that every applicant will be provided objection form at the time of entering into examination hall, so first he should be obliged to do audit exercise as to how many questions are out of his syllabus.

"Much time of the candidate would be lapsed and consumed to go through the entire question paper as an examiner and then filling the objection forms.

"No further mechanism has been provided in the above announcement as to how and when the students appearing in the MDCAT will come to know whether objections raised by them were considered and the question considered by them to be outside the identified syllabus have been removed from scoring or not.

PMC, this year, launched the MDCAT to bring "uniformity" into the medical profession.

"The MDCAT is being held to ensure that the aspiring doctors and dentists coming into the health sector have basic minimum academic achievement at the point of entry," Dr Faisal Sultan, the premier's aide on health said.