Daily Times

Pakistan Medical Commission (PMC) on Monday said that the MDCAT exams will continue as per the schedule and all results will be subject to the post-exam analysis, any corrections required, and after rechecking.

The decision was made by the PMC’s Medical and Dental Council in its deliberation on the meeting held by the PMC president with the student delegation.

According to PMC’s decisions, the council, after detailed deliberations on the issue, concluded that the 2021 MDCAT exam is being conducted strictly as per the syllabus and structure prepared by the National Medical and Dental Academic Board.

It added, 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 noted that as part of the standard process, the entire exam system is constantly put through a technical audit to ensure the system is working fine. This is continuing and the final results of the technical review specifically pertaining to the concerns raised by the students will be made public at the conclusion of the exam.

At the conclusion of the exam, a post-exam analysis will be carried out by a team of experts as per international standards.

It added the results will be made public and any questions found to be contrary to the principles of examination in terms of being vague or sufficiently discriminatory will be removed and any student attempting such removed question would be given a full mark for the question.

After the conclusion of the exam, every paper will be automatically rechecked by the system for any errors or anomalies as well as verified and reviewed.

It said that at the conclusion of the post-exam analysis and review or rechecking of papers by the system, the final results will be notified in the first week of October. Therefore, students should wait for the final conclusion of the exam rather than pre-empting facts.

A student can neither be provided a copy of their question paper and answers, nor shown their paper physically. The paper is in a digital format and so are the answers which are scored by a computer and there is no human error element involved.

Furthermore, releasing the question papers containing the questions and answers is contrary to best practices internationally as that results in the question bank being exposed and results in academies developing keys to prepare students through the system.

It said that a question bank is meant to be confidential and not opened so that it can be used for a considerable period of time. There are a limited number of questions that can be framed to test the grasp of a particular concept.

Constantly making questions from the question bank public will result in students having all possible exam questions at one stage to prepare for future exams and lower the quality and competitiveness of future exams.

Each student’s paper and score are encrypted. Showing it to a student would require decrypting and will result in a process that will take at least 6-8 months considering there are almost 200,000 students – making the exercise unfeasible.

The council said that students have to accept the result and the integrity of the result. Mere allegations by a student who did not pass cannot be the basis to open an entire exam disclosing the confidential question bank.

It said that the council has been consistently reviewing the issues being raised by students and parents and is concerned that a few important aspects regarding the MDCAT and the potentially fewer students qualifying this year are not being taken into account.