Officials of the Nashik-based Maharashtra University of Health Sciences, who met those from the Department of Medical Education and Drugs to discuss modalities recently, will issue a notification to individual colleges in a couple of days.

The CET, which will cover an estimated 40,000-odd students, will be conducted for the first time in the state following a Supreme Court order in June last year. The test, which had stirred a controversy last year, will comprise multiple choice questions in four subjects -- Physics, Chemistry, Biology and English.

The English component has been included only as a qualifying subject whose marks will not be counted while the merit list is compiled, according to Dr D G Dongaonkar, vice-chancellor of the health university. Thesubject has been included as per the recommendations of the Medical Council of India (MCI), the apex body governing medical education.

Questions for the 200-mark CET will be drawn from Std XII Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC) syllabus and its evaluation will be computerised. The test, which will be jointly devised and administered by the Nashik university and the Department of Medical Education, will have ``minimum human involvement'' in evaluation, Medical Education Secretary Thomas Benjamin, told Express Newsline.

While paper-setting, evaluation, dispersal and collection of examination forms will be the university's responsibility, the government will take care of examination centres, supervisors, transporting of examination papers, answer-sheets, and security arrangements, he says.

Though a tentative date has already been fixed, the examination centres has yet to be announced. While there will be one centre at every district headquarters in the state, the number of centres will finallydepend on the number of applicants.

The centres will be notified on the hall tickets, which will tentatively be issued on April 5 and forms will be available at individual medical colleges from February 8 to 28. In places where there are no medical colleges, it will be distributed at the district collectorate.

The CET itself will be conducted over two sessions with an hour-long interval, each session lasting two hours, 10 minutes. Though the first semester of all medical courses usually commence in August, no date has been fixed for declaration of the CET's merit list.

As per the MCI's rules, any state with more than one board for higher secondary education must conduct a CET for admissions to medical courses. In Maharashtra, secondary education is conducted by institutions affiliated to the Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education, the New Delhi-based Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and the Indian Certificate of Secondary Education (ICSE).

However, the stategovernment had not implemented the MCI's recommendation and continued to conduct medical admissions on the basis of marks obtained in the Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC) exam.

However, since this gave HSC students an edge over the CBSE and ICSE students as the former secure higher marks than those affiliated to the Delhi boards, a petition was filed in the Bombay High Court urging it to direct the government to conduct a CET. The state government, which lost the case, then appealed to the apex court, saying the health university had just been set up and it thus needed more time to prepare for the CET. The Supreme Court thus stayed the CET for a year, directing the government to implement it in 1999.