India Cancels National Pre-Medical Entrance Exam Over Cheating Concerns

A question paper leak and distribution of answer keys forced India to cancel its nationwide medical entrance examination on Monday, with the country’s Supreme Court deeming that there were too many irregularities for the test to proceed as planned.

The All India Pre Medical Entrance Test (AIPMT) will be rescheduled to take place in four weeks, Yahoo News reported, with the apex court rejecting the plea of India’s Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) that scrapping the exam would affect hundreds of thousands of aspiring medical students and also delay the admission process for various colleges.

Many of those students, however, are worried that four weeks is not enough preparation time after the sudden cancellation. “I am so tense now,” 19-year-old Swaraj Mishra from the central Indian city of Bhopal told the Hindustan Times newspaper. “Now again a great uncertainty has set in.”

Over 630,000 students take the annual examination to compete for only 3,800 college positions, and the Supreme Court bench stood firm even though only 44 of them were accused of malpractice.

“The bigger issue is that the sanctity of the examination is under suspicion,” the judges declared. “We want to be doubly sure that there is no alternative but to order re-conduct of the exam.”