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 Even as the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences (NBEMS) has deferred the Diploma in Pharmacy Exit Exam (DPEE) scheduled to be held in October first week, the pharmacy academic community demands that a uniform academic calendar should be brought out by the Pharmacy Council of India (PCI) for the conduct of one admission, one examination and one date of result publication for the diploma in pharmacy course (D Pharm) at all India level.
If so, after a gap of one month of the result publication the students can go for the Exit Exam and register their certificates with respective state pharmacy councils on time without losing any academic year, they suggest.
Making a suggestion of this sort, a pharmacy teacher from the Government Pharmacy College in Kozhikodu in Kerala has written a letter to the PCI for its consideration.
Dr. Jijith US, in his letter to the PCI stated that the D Pharm course is conducted in the country based on a uniform curriculum and it is on the basis of the Education Regulations 2020. The Exit Exam is applicable only to the students who got admitted in 2022 onwards. In Kerala the Part Two examination for the D Pharm course (second year) was completed in the first week of September only. The result of the course will come out after two months. In certain other states also, the examination was conducted very late due to delay in the admissions. Dr. Jijith says that even if the National Board of Examinations conducts one exit exam in six months, the students will lose one year to do their registrations. Very few states’ boards of examinations have completed the examination processes before July 31. So, in order to avoid this long gap, common dates for admissions, examinations and results should be fixed by the PCI and all state boards conducting the diploma course should follow them.
Further, Dr. Jijith has pointed out one serious lacuna in the course curriculum for the D Pharm course existing in India. He says that the PCI has prescribed four study papers (subjects) for the first year (Part I) and six papers for the second year (Part II) of the diploma course. Although the education regulator has prescribed some reference books for each paper, it has not prescribed particular academic texts for study in Part I and in Part II for each paper. Similar to the CBSE syllabus, the PCI should come forward with common academic text books for each paper for the first year and for the second year. If there are common text books for each paper, there will be a uniform teaching and learning process among the teachers as well as the students. This will create a better educational environment in the entry level of pharmacy education in India.
According to Dr. Jijith, the syllabus of the DPEE is based on the syllabus of the D Pharm course. But there is no information about the scrutiny of the questions as to whether they are based on the papers prescribed for each year of the diploma course. He said there are three papers for the exit exam and the paper one includes pharmaceutics, pharmacy law and ethics, community pharmacy and management and hospital and clinical pharmacy. A student has to attain 50 per cent of the total marks in each paper to clear the test. The second paper of the DPEE test includes anatomy and physiology, pharmacology and pharmacotherapeutics. The third paper comprises biochemistry, clinical pathology, pharmacognosy, pharmaceutical chemistry and social pharmacy. These papers are taught to the students in their first year and second year of the course. He wanted the PCI to ensure that the questions for the DPEE are framed within the syllabi of the D Pharm.
He suggests that a meeting of chairmen of all states’ D Pharm boards should be called by PCI to draft a common academic calendar with one admission date, one date of starting of classes, one examination and one date for result publication in all India level.
Giving full support to the suggestions made by Dr. Jijith, the academic expert and president of the West Bengal IPA, Dr. Probir Kumar Bannerjee said it is high time for the PCI to chalk out a common strategic plan for the conduct of the course D Pharm. He said a uniform academic calendar for the diploma course is a long-standing demand of the pharmacy institutions in the country. He said, in West Bengal there are a few universities that also conduct the diploma course, as a result, admissions and examinations are conducted at various times. Once a common academic calendar is in place, it will help for timely conduct of admissions, examinations and result publications, he added.
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