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Mumbai: Maharashtra Minister Chandrakant Patil has said that from the next academic year, the Common Entrance Test (CET) for professional courses in Maharashtra will be conducted at the examination centres only in the state to prevent malpractices.

With this, students from outside Maharashtra taking the CET for a course offered by an institution will have to travel to an examination centre in the state.

The announcement comes in the wake of alleged irregularities at some examination centres outside Maharashtra.

"To maintain transparency and prevent malpractices in the CET, the state government has decided to restrict examination centres within Maharashtra from next year," the Higher and Technical Education Minister said.

The minister was referring to a recent case wherein four candidates from a single exam centre in Bihar's Patna scored a perfect 100 percentile in the Maharashtra CET for the five-year LLB course. The matter is now under investigation by the state Crime Investigation Department (CID).

"Such incidents raise serious doubts and undermine the credibility of the examination process. But by conducting the CET only in Maharashtra, we can ensure better monitoring and reduce the risk of organised malpractices," Patil said.

The Mumbai Crime Branch had earlier taken action against an admission racket that allegedly extracted money from students by promising to inflate their scores in the CET. Three persons from Delhi had been arrested in this connection.

Over 10 lakh students appear for various CETs every year, with more than 25,000 of them opting for centres outside Maharashtra.

"The new move would not only help maintain fairness but also enhance the integrity of the admission process," Patil said.

The minister also spoke about the low turnout for the CET for BCA, BBA, BMS and BBM courses this year. For over 2,00,000 seats, only 61,666 students took the exam.

"Since many seats are likely to remain vacant, students will be given another opportunity to take the CET," he said.

(Except for the headline, this article has not been edited by FPJ's editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)