FROM this academic year, it will be even more difficult to crack the Maharashtra Health and Technical Common Entrance Test (MH-CET), the common entrance exam for admission to engineering, pharmacy and other courses. The state government recently announced its decision to revise the exam syllabus, and in MHCET 2018, 20 per cent questions will be based on the Class XI syllabus and the remaining will be from the Class XII syllabus. Earlier, students only had to study the Class XII syllabus, as all the questions in MH-CET were based on that. The state government's decision to revise the syllabus has upset students and parents, as well as coaching classes and subject experts. Terming it as a 'last minute' announcement, most experts said the government hadn't considered the fact that students start training for the competitive exam at least a year ahead. According to them, most students have already completed their syllabus by now and are planning to conduct revisions in the last few months. It would have made more sense if the revised exam syllabus was implemented from March 2019. Dilip Shah, who runs the Science Academy, said students should be told about the pattern of the competitive exam and its syllabus at the time of taking admission in Class XI. "The notification about the syllabus change came only a few days ago. By now, we have finished 80 per cent of the syllabus. For the exam, the students don't prepare only for a few days or weeks, they start preparing months in advance, balancing board exams and competitive entrance tests. Besides, most students appear for multiple entrance tests, and a student preparing for MH-CET may also be preparing for another entrance test. When last-minute changes are announced, their entire planning goes for a toss. At our classes, we will start Class XI revision lectures once Diwali holidays are over. We don't object to a change in syllabus. but the timing could have been better," he said. Students, on the other hand, complained that just when they had started to accept the fact that MH-CET will now be as difficult to crack as the JEE, the state Directorate of Technical Education announced the final syllabus and break-up of marks applicable for MH-CET in May 2018, which includes 20 per cent weightage for the Class XI syllabus of the state board. "By now, we have forgotten most of what we learnt in Class XI because we have been so engrossed in studying our Class XII syllabus. Now, we have to put that aside and go back to what we studied in Class XI. I think such a last-minute change is unfair.," said Shreya Apte, a Class XII student. According to teachers at some tutorial classes, not only will students have to solve a much more difficult question paper in MH-CET 2018, even the time allotted to complete the test may not be enough. Kedar Takalkar, who runs a tutorial class and also works as a career counsellor, pointed out, "In JEE exams, the total number of questions are 90, with 30 from each category. In MH-CET, there would be 200 questions in total. That will make MH-CET almost as difficult as JEE, but the number of questions would be more, which means students will get barely 54 seconds to solve each question.". Jharna Shah, a student, said that since the MH-CET was for admissions in state-run colleges, there was no need to make it as difficult as the JEE, which qualifies students for admission to IITs. However, Harish Butle, founder of DEEPER, which conducts mock entrance tests, said better planning was needed before introducing Class XI syllabus in MH-CET. "The state government has to make its stand clear. why are they doing this. they have been saying they will make the entrance test more difficult and bring it on par with those conducted by the central government. Is a nationalised test going to decide admissions in state engineering colleges, like it happened with medical seats? If the idea is to bring it on par with JEE, then why give weightage to only part of the Class XI syllabus, and not the entire syllabus, like JEE does? Some planning needs to go into this, especially about how much time should be given to students, and upgrading the state syllabus to bring it on par with other boards," said Butle.
