Centralised admission tests for Calcutta University’s postgraduate departments and self-financed master’s programmes at affiliated colleges will only be conducted online.

The university had introduced a single centralised admission test in each subject last year for students applying to the courses offered by its 66 postgraduate departments and colleges. It was an offline exam.

The university on Monday announced that the centralised admission test would be conducted online from this year for greater transparency and prompt publication of results.

“We decided to go online to make the examination system more transparent. By eliminating pen and paper, we can avert problems such as question papers not reaching the centres on time or wrong question papers being distributed. It will also cut down on the time taken for publication of results,” vice-chancellor Sonali Chakravarti Banerjee said.

Applicants will have to take the tests at university-designated centres. The date for the tests will be announced soon, the vice-chancellor said.

The university had allowed several colleges affiliated to it to run self-financed postgraduate courses towards the beginning of the last decade.

The colleges were granted full autonomy to run the courses — be it designing the syllabus, setting questions and examining answer scripts. The university and the colleges jointly awarded the degrees.

But there were complaints against some colleges for not maintaining the standard of the courses.

The university later introduced a uniform system for postgraduate courses so that the admission procedure, course structure and exam system would be the same in all the colleges as well as the university’s own postgraduate departments.

The 2019 academic session for postgraduate courses will start in August. The date for holding the online tests for admitting the 2019-20 batch will be announced soon, the vice-chancellor said.

Sixty per cent of the seats in all postgraduate courses will be reserved for students who clear the undergraduate courses from the university-affiliated colleges in the current year. The rest of the seats will be open to both Calcutta University students and those graduating from other universities.

The university also plans to ensure transparency in the postgraduate semester examinations by making it compulsory for students to write the tests at centres set up in other colleges, vice-chancellor Chakravarti Banerjee said.