Pune: The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) will conduct the University Grant Commission-National Eligibility Test (UGC-NET) as per the existing schedule, said Union Minister of State for Human Resource Development (HRD) Mahendra Nath Pandey.
He cited a letter issued by MHRD, Department of Higher Education.
The clarification was made against the backdrop of recent amendments to the UGC-NET examination. Pandey informed this in a written reply to a Rajya Sabha question on Thursday.
This comes as a clarification that NET will continue to be held as per the existing rule of twice a year instead of once a year. Doubts had surfaced as the CBSE was supposed to conduct the NET exam in July 2017, which was postponed. It will be conducted on November 5 this year. However, the clarification comes as a relief to many students.
The letter also mentions that the UGC intimated that 11.16 lakh candidates had appeared for the UGC-NET exam during 2016-17 (July 2016 and January 2017), which was 31,566 more than the number of candidates that appeared for the exam during 2015-16 (June 2015 and December 2015).
However, the qualifying percentage of students, who have taken four such recent examinations during 2015-2017, ranged between 3.99 per cent (January, 2017) to 4.96 per cent
(December, 2015).
