“There is no doubt that this CUET, similar to NEET will side-line the diverse school education systems across the country, grossly undermine the relevance of overall development-oriented long-form learning in schools and make students rely upon coaching centres for improving their entrance examination scores,” reads the letter sent by CM Stalin to PM Modi.

He further flagged the concern that since the CUET exam is based on the NCERT syllabus it will put students who have studied in the state boards and belong to the marginalised family in a disadvantageous position.

“I wish to reiterate that any entrance examination that is based on NCERT syllabus will not provide an equal opportunity to all students who have studied in varied State Board syllabi across the country. In most States, State Board syllabus students constitute more than 80 per cent of the total student population and these students invariably hail from the marginalised sections. Hence an NCERT syllabus based entrance examination would place this deserving majority in a disadvantageous position in securing admission in Central Universities,” the letter reads.

He further added that the CUET exam will lead to a drastic reduction of students from Tamil Nadu to Central Universities due to the said factors.

The University Grant Commission (UGC) on Wednesday directed the Central Universities to use only Common University Admission Test (CUET) for admission in Under Graduate (UG) programmes.

The application procedure for CUET 2022 will begin today.As per the official information bulletin, the three-and-a-half-hour computer-based entrance test will only have multiple-choice questions based on the content of class 12 NCERT textbooks. CUET will essentially have three parts. Students will be marked negatively for incorrect answers.

The CUET 2022 exam is scheduled to take place in the first and second week of July 2022. However, no set date has been announced by the NTA yet. The date will soon be declared on the official CUET website — cuet.samarth.ac.in — or NTA website — nta.ac.in.