The Pakistan Medical and Dental Council has postponed the Medical and Dental College Admission Test, moving the 2026 exam from August 16 to September 20 (Geo News).
The council said the decision was taken on the direction of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who instructed the department concerned to conduct a more transparent and organised exam. All other terms and arrangements remain intact, the PMDC said; only the date has changed. Students were directed to take the latest information from the council’s website.
The five-week deferral is a substantial one for candidates who had been preparing to a mid-August date, and the stated reason — transparency and organisation rather than any external circumstance — points at the conduct of the exam itself. The MDCAT has been dogged by paper-leak allegations and by disputes over provincial conduct in recent years. Last year the council rescheduled the test because of flooding.
Separately, the PMDC said Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar had chaired a high-level committee overseeing the strengthening of the regulatory framework for medical and dental education, with a sub-committee on the accreditation of colleges and postgraduate qualifications meeting to review reforms.
That committee resolved that students intending to study medicine or dentistry abroad must “mandatorily qualify for the MDCAT examination and obtain registration with the PMDC” before leaving, to avoid later difficulty with recognition, licensing or registration — a requirement the council first made mandatory in May.
