Friday, December 19, 2008

No GATE Exam for M.Pharma Admissions from 2010 - TOI

Coming 2010, there will be no GATE examination for pharmacy students. 2009 will be the last year when the Indian Institutes of Technology, jointly with the Indian Institute of Science-Bangalore, will conduct the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) for pharmacy students wanting to pursue their master’s programme.

This may come as a blow to lakhs of meritorious students who have, for years, taken the GATE examination for admission to the two-year MPharm programme in institutes across the country. In a Right To Information application

filed by Vinay Sonawane, a pharmacy student, the IITs acknowledged that they would stop conducting this entrance exam for pharmacy students after 2009. These institutes have always conducted the admission test but have never offered the course.

There are close to 1,000 colleges offering pharmacy courses in India and a GATE-qualified student is entitled to a monthly scholarship of Rs 5,000. Students will now have to queue up in front of private colleges where, academicians fear, admission standards will be compromised.

IIT-Guwahati director Gautam Barua maintained that the institutes’ faculty members were stretched and the IITs and IISc had to depend on faculty members from other pharmacy colleges to conduct the test. “It was getting more and more difficult to ensure that outside faculty members maintained the same standards as ours,” he added.

Similarly, IIT-Roorkee director S C Saxena confirmed that the decision to discontinue the entrance test was taken by the national co-ordinating committee.

GATE is conducted for students wanting to take up master’s in 74 areas, including engineering, architecture and life sciences.

Source : Times of India

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