Jamaat-e-Islami to protest against MDCAT 2020

KARACHI: Hafiz Naeem ur Rehman, who leads Jamaat-e-Islami's Karachi chapter, has announced that his party will protest against the recently-held Medical and Dental College Admission Test (MDCAT) 2020.

Addressing a press conference on Thursday, Rehman also announced a protest against the PTI government's approval of the census, terming it "hostility towards the people of Karachi".

"When the census is not accurate, people's right to representation is affected," Rehman said. There is solid evidence that the population of Karachi was counted as almost half of the original, he claimed.

The JI leader said that the 2017 census was a "robbery" of the rights of the people.

"Jamaat-e-Islami will start the next phase of protests from December 26," Naeem added.

Two days earlier, Rehman had declared that he was going to approach the court, in solidarity with medical students who are demanding the MDCAT be conducted again.

During a press conference in the city, he had said that a commission must conduct a probe to determine who designed the exam. He said that democracy "is slaughtered in the assemblies".

"I will see what Murad Ali Shah does for medical students," he had remarked.

The test

The MDCAT was conducted across the country on November 29 after multiple delays and hiccups with students chiefly demanding deferment due to the coronavirus pandemic and some complaining of a change in the syllabus on short notice.

The entry exam comprised 200 multiple-choice questions with the candidates given two hours to answer them.

Each MCQ carried five marks. The test had 80 Biology, 60 Chemistry, 40 Physics, and 20 English questions.

Results challenged

Following the results which came out on December 16, protests broke out over inaccuracies, with some students calling attention to the fact that they were marked erroneously absent.

Some students also complained of a mismatch between roll numbers and names.

The Pakistan Medical Commission then took the results offline for 30 hours for "reconciliation" and reissued results.

The PMC, in a statement said that "less than 2%" of the total number of students who took the exam faced these difficulties and submitted complaints.

"The PMC has re-checked and can confirm that 14 marks have been added to the result of each student who took the exam on the 29th of November 2020. Moreover, 7 marks have been added to the result of each student who took the exam on the 13th of December 2020," read the statement.

"However, no matter how small that number was, the complaints were of grave concern to the PMC," it added.