The National Testing Agency (NTA) of the Ministry of Higher Education recently announced that the first-ever mandatory common entrance test (CUET) for admission to undergraduate programmes would be held in the 1st week of July. UGC funds 45 central universities, including prominent universities like Delhi University, Jamia Millia Islamia, Aligarh Muslim University and Banaras Hindu University. Admissions to these universities will henceforth be solely based on the CUET scores, while class 12th boards will not carry any weightage. However, universities have been given an option to use Board examination scores as a minimum criterion for admissions into the universities. The universities, however, can use the Board exam marks as an eligibility criterion for the test.

What is CUET?

The Common University Entrance Test (CUET) is a computerized exam that the National Testing Agency will conduct to take admissions into Central Universities, replacing the Class 12th scores-based admission system. The application window for the same will open on 2nd April, and the last date for the same is 30th April.
The Syllabus of CUET will be as per the model syllabus of class 12th of NCERT. The CUET will have four sections: Section IA, Section IB, Section II and Section III.
Section IA and IB will involve papers on languages. The following Section will be on core subjects that a candidate wants to pursue. And the last Section will be a general test only for specific programmes.

Section IA: This section will be compulsory, and there will be a choice of 13 languages, and candidates will have to choose the language of their choice. These include English, Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
A candidate will have to attempt 40 out of 50 questions in this Section in under 45 minutes.

Section IB: This Section will be optional. There are 19 Languages in this Section. Any other language apart from those offered in Section IA may be chosen. Some of these languages include French, German, Arabic, Persian, Italian etc.
A candidate will have to attempt 40 out of 50 questions in this Section in under 45 minutes.

Section II: In this section, students can pick upto a maximum of 6 subjects that they wish to pursue from a list of 27 subjects, including Accountancy, Biology, Biotechnology, Economics, History, Performing Arts like Dance, Theatre, Music, Arts and many more.
A candidate will have to attempt 40 out of 50 questions in this Section in under 45 minutes.

Section III: This section will be a general test for any UG programme that requires a general aptitude test instead of a domain specific test. This paper will include general knowledge, quantitative reasoning, current affairs, and other such things to assess an individual's aptitude.
The duration of this will be one hour. A candidate will have to attempt 60 out of 75 questions in the given time.

Talking about the benefits of CUET, it will not only provide equal opportunities to students from across boards but will also enable students to focus more on learning instead of collecting maximum marks in class 12th. It is also expected to reduce the financial burden on parents as candidates will only have to write one exam for multiple universities. The state and private universities and deemed to be universities can also use CUET scores for admissions if they desire.