Around 1,000 students who appeared in the last medical college admission test have applied for re-examination of their test papers.
The recheck requests are handled by the medical education department of the Director General of Health Services (DGHS), which charges a fee of Tk1,000 for the service.
The medical admission tests for this academic year were held on October 4.
Head of the department professor Dr. ABM Abdul Hannan told the Dhaka Tribune that a new committee would be formed soon to re-examine the papers. First the office must find the applicants’ test papers from a total of 66,448 papers.
Then it will be checked by a separate OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) machine which was not used to check the papers before. The re-examination would be held in the third week of November.
Professor Hannan said no changes had been found in re-examinations in the last few years.
“The students and their parents thought we were wrong but it has been proved many times, even in the High Court, that the OMR results are accurate,” he added.
On the other hand the admission timeline in public medical and dental colleges ended on Tuesday. There are 2,812 seats available at the 22 government-run medical colleges and 532 seats in the nine dental colleges and units throughout Bangladesh.
Hundreds of students are on a waiting list, to get admission if any seats remain vacant.
It was learnt that the number of vacant seats in the medical colleges was almost zero this year. But there were a few seats vacant in the dental colleges.
A DGHS official said they did not yet have the information from all colleges, but around 50-60 seats were likely to be vacant in the dental colleges. Last year a total of 247 seats were found vacant in medical and dental colleges after the admission process was completed.
Besides the public colleges, private medical and dental colleges have also started to admit students. They have been giving advertisement of admission in the newspapers. It has been learnt that as per DGHS instructions, they will start to distribute application forms from November 10. The price of application forms have been fixed at Tk1,000 each.
Students have to submit their applications within November 20. The merit list will be published on November 21. Admission process will begin for the selected students on November 21 and the last date of admission will be December 10. The students who will get at least 120 will be allowed to apply for admission. Students may apply in the merit and poor quota getting a separate form that is free of cost.
