PESHAWAR: The Peshawar High Court has directed the Khyber Medical University`s vice chancellor to respond to a petition filed by several students to seek grace pass marks in the recent Medical and Dental Colleges Admission Test (MDCAT) over `faulty` question paper.

A bench consisting of Justice Shakeel Ahmad and Justice Sahibzada Asadullah directed the VC to file the reply to the petition within a fortnight.

It issued the order after preliminary hearing into a petitionjointly filed by Ahmad Noor and 13 other students and MDCAT candidates from Peshawar, who sought orders for the respondents, including KMU, to award grace pass marks to them insisting universities in other provinces have awarded grace marks through public notices issued on Sept 24 and Sept 29 to candidates for admission to medical and dental colleges.

Theyalsorequestedthecourt to declare void the denialof the respondents to entertain the requests and complaints of the petitioners regarding the entrance test held on Sept 22.

The respondents in the petition include the federal government through the secretary of the ministry of health services regulations, Pakistan Medical and Dental Council through its secretary, KMU through its VC, Higher Education Commission through its chairman, and provincial health secretary.Advocate Sher Haider Khan appeared for the petitioners and said that the PMDC had called for a screening test to admissions in MBBS and BDS courses for the year 2024-2025 through an advertisement in different newspapers on Aug 5, 2024.

He said that responsibility for administering the MDCAT had been delegated to various government universities in each province.

He said that the responsibility in Punjab was assigned to the University of Health Sciences Lahore, in Sindh to Dow University of Health Sciences, to KMU Peshawar in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, to Bolan University of Medical and Health Sciences in Balochistan, to Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Medical University in Islamabad and Karakoram International University in Gilgit-Baltistan.

The counsel said that as thepetitioners were qualified and eligible candidates they applied for the test conducted by the KMU and appeared in it.

He claimed that the petitioners attempted all questions but found out that some questions in the paper had `multiple interpretations, high difficulty level, wrong answer keys, and wrong or confusing answers.

The lawyer said that the petitioners filed complaints with the KMU for reviewing answer keys through independent subject experts and on their recommendations the petitioners were awarded grace pass marks against the `disputed` questions.

He, however, said that the requestsor complaints had not beenrespondedto.

Mr Haider said that after so many controversial episodes related to MDCATs in the last couple of years, it was hoped that this year, the medical col-leges entrance test would be conducted in a fair manner by the PMDC, but that didn`t happen.

He claimed that there were large-scale protests in other parts of the country regarding irregularities in the test, including out-of-syllabus questions in the paper.

The lawyer argued that the petitioners had the constitutional right to file complaints about anything found wrong or misleading in the question paper, but the attitude of the respondents was highly unprofessional.

He claimed that in identical cases, the Shaheed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto University Islamabad and University of Health Sciences Lahore awarded grace pass marks to their candidates as per expert recommendations and the difficulty index as per public notices on Sep 24 and 27, respectively.