Telangana students brace up to pay hefty fee for EAPCET answer key challenges

Hyderabad: Challenging the Telangana Engineering, Agriculture and Pharmacy Common Entrance Test (TG EAPCET) preliminary keys will be an expensive affair for students.

Commencing this year, the Telangana Council of Higher Education decided to levy a charge of Rs 500 on each objection raised against the preliminary keys for all Telangana Common Entrance Tests, including the EAPCET.

For instance, if a student challenges EAPCET answers to 10 questions, he/she will have to pay Rs 5,000.

Further, a student needs to pay a staggering Rs 80,000 if he/she challenges answers to all 160 questions given in the entrance exam.

So far, such a fee has not been required to raise objections. This decision is likely to spark concerns among students taking various entrance exams.

Further, compared with the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) and National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Examination (NEET) UG conducted by the National Testing Agency, where the challenging fee is Rs 200 per answer, Telangana’s decision seems unusually high.

However, the fee will be refunded if the challenged answer key for a question is valid and accepted by the experts committee. As per exam procedure, all objections received against the preliminary keys are placed before the subject experts committee, which scrutinises them and comes out with a final key.

“The fee will be refunded if objections are accepted. This will be done after a week into the announcement of the final key,”  officials said.

The move, according officials, is aimed at curbing non-serious candidates registering  a large number of objections against the preliminary keys every year. Last year, the EAPCET received around 900 objections on the preliminary keys.

Meanwhile, as per schedule released by the JNTU-Hyderabad, which is conducting the EAPCET, the notification will be released on February 20 with registrations opening on February 25 and the last date to submit an application without a late fee is April 4.

The entrance test for admissions to agriculture and pharmacy programmes is scheduled for April 29 and 30, while the engineering entrance test will be held from May 2 to 5. Both the tests will be conducted covering 100 percent of the intermediate syllabus.