NET to be held under CBSE’s watch

The University Grants Commission (UGC) on Tuesday decided to “outsource” the conduct of the National Eligibility Test (NET) for university-level teaching and junior research fellowships to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE).

Under consideration for over a year now, the decision was taken at the meeting of the full commission. If all goes as per schedule, the next NET examination in December will be held under CBSE’s watch. For CBSE, this will be a first as the Board has till now conducted examinations only for secondary and school-leaving students. The minimum qualification for NET is post-graduation. The UGC will share its resource persons with CBSE to set the question papers in 80 subjects.

According to sources, UGC decided to outsource NET because it was ill-equipped to conduct the nation-wide examination. The CBSE, on the other hand, had the infrastructure and had developed the expertise from conducting school-leaving examinations, All-India Engineering Entrance Examination and All India Pre-Medical Test annually.

Deemed-to-be-varsities

The commission has also decided to seek more time from the Supreme Court to decide on the fate of the 41 deemed-to-be-universities which were to be derecognised as per the 2009 Tandon Committee recommendations.

In January, the apex court had asked the commission to submit its report on the status of these institutions to the Human Resource Development Ministry by July 31.

Though the UGC had set up a four-member sub-committee to assess the 41 deemed universities, the members could arrive at a consensus and submit a report to the commission on Tuesday. In view of this, the commission decided to seek more time to take a final view on the contentious issue.