Daily Times

KARACHI: The students enrolling themselves for Entry Test in various universities are facing enormous difficulties in creating their profile on the Higher Education Commission website, Daily Times has learnt.

The massive number of registrations and heavy traffic of candidates, visiting the HEC’s website has resulted in the portal of the website showing slip-up with the message “Sorry, something went wrong”. Most of the students are worried about their future due to this situation since they have failed to get them selves registered for Entry Test of the desired varsities.

Last month, HEC’s authorizes had established Education Testing Council to conduct Entry Test for undergraduate program. It was aimed to conduct standardized testing process for admission to from fall session of 2017. The ETC also offered free of cost services for all candidates who want be enrolled in the public and private sector universities in the desired undergraduate program while those students who obtain the required results, their test results would be valid for two years.

However, ET will be conducted under the HEC’s Education Testing Council but it is not essential for the varsities to adopt the same process of testing. The varsities reserve the rights of the selection of candidates and each university is independent to set its own selection criteria.

However, the varsities had immediately adopted the HEC instructions regarding ET across Pakistan as most the varsities administrations are trying to meet the criteria of HEC’s Quality Assurance Agency and obtain good ranking. Earlier, National Testing Service (NTS), a private institution providing services to conduct test for employment, admission’s entry tests and selection of candidates but it was disputed and had no reputation.

“We have forwarded Education Testing Council’s instructions of ET to all universities across Pakistan and some the varsities have adopted that and those varsities also uploaded their own criteria for on HEC website to inform the candidates”, said Director Media HEC Ayesha Ikram. She confirmed that HEC has received complaints from different candidates for not getting response from HEC’s website but they had fixed the issue a week ago.

However she rejected the claim of error to the HEC’s website. “HEC’s website is running smoothly and there is no issue has been occurred” she insisted, every candidate could scan their documents and can make their profile easily for ET of the varsities where they want to appear.

Published in Daily Times, July 8^th , 2017.