Sixty seats and 5,000 fighters for MBBS admission in ST John's medical College Bangalore

Around 5,000 students from across 13 centres in the country battled it out for the 60 MBBS seats of St John's Medical College at their entrance exam on Sunday. The exam went off peacefully with no cases of malpractices reported.


The exam was conducted between 9 am and 12 noon simultaneously in two centres in the state, in Mangalore and Bangalore - with 1,200 students writing in the Bangalore centre alone. The other centres include Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Guwahati, Ranchi, Goa, Hyderabad, Vijayawada, Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram. Candidates wrote four papers - Physics, Chemistry, Biology as well as English and Values.


Students paid an exam fee of Rs 550 and the absentee rate was about 5%. Of the 5,000 students, 140 will be selected for the interview, which is likely to be held in the third week of July. The exam was given a go-ahead by the Justice Venkataraman Committee. "We have always had a different footing in the courts, since we charge no capitation fee and we practice social justice," said Kalam. Students of the college are required to take a two year pledge to serve in anyone of the 450 medically underserved areas across the country identified by the institution.


St John's maintains a 50:50 ratio for men and women and reserves 75 % of their seats for minority communities. Overlapping in these reservations is an 18 % quota for SC/ST/OBC and 33 % for students from Karnataka. One seat is set aside for the central government. The institute's entrance exam for the Post certificate B.Sc for Nurses will be held on Monday. And the B.Sc Nursing entrance test will be held on June 25.
(TOI Dated:05/06/2006)