The Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISE) Hyderabad has declared the mark sheets of 43 candidates who passed this year's Medical and Dental College Admissions Test (MDCAT) and gained admission to Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences (LUMHS) in Jamshoro to have been tampered with, it emerged on Monday.
The finding came after LUMHS sent the mark sheets of 48 candidates to the board for verification, on the orders of a division bench of the Sindh High Court. Officials said the board authenticated only five of the transcripts and found the remaining 43 to have been tampered with.
The verification was ordered by a bench comprising Justice Adnan-ul-Karim Memon and Justice Mohammad Jaffer Raza, which ruled that the matter "calls for verification and regulatory compliance". The bench was hearing a petition filed by a girl student who had secured 150 out of 180 marks in the MDCAT.
The petitioner had drawn the court's attention to a striking discrepancy in the case of one student, identified as Fariha, who had obtained 869 marks in the Intermediate Examination 2026, whereas her purported mark sheet, dated 19 August 2026, reflected 930 marks — a difference of 61 marks. That single example prompted the court to order a wider check of the candidates' records.
The Hyderabad board's declaration is the latest turn in a scandal that first surfaced last week, when two leading public-sector medical universities in Sindh detected more than 50 suspicious mark sheets submitted by candidates seeking admission to medical colleges. LUMHS had identified 43 questionable mark sheets, while Jinnah Sindh Medical University (JSMU) in Karachi had detected another seven.
According to sources cited by The News, the suspicious mark sheets belonged to candidates who had appeared in the Higher Secondary School Certificate pre-medical examinations conducted by BISE Hyderabad. In several cases, candidates' aggregate marks had allegedly been increased by 50 to 100 under the pretext of scrutiny, potentially enabling them to secure higher positions on the highly competitive merit lists for admission to MBBS programmes.
Sources said the controversial scrutiny had allegedly been carried out while Hyderabad Board chairman Faqir Muhammad Lakho was abroad performing Umrah. Complaints about alleged manipulation in the board's Intermediate Part-II annual examination results for 2026 had already surfaced, and the board's deputy controller of examinations for the Top Secret Branch, Ejaz Ali Kaka, has been suspended in connection with the matter.
The scale of the problem may yet grow. Sources fear the number of questionable mark sheets could increase substantially if all public-sector medical universities undertake a comprehensive verification of candidates' academic records against the original examination gazettes issued by the respective education boards. The discrepancies so far have emerged from comparing the marks on the submitted documents with the scores recorded in the board's official gazette.
LUMHS, for its part, has denied social media reports that it freshly admitted a student who had submitted fake mark sheets for matriculation and intermediate examinations. In a statement on Sunday, a university spokesman said the varsity followed a strict policy of verifying mark sheets with the education boards before allowing a student to sit the admission test, and that any student found to have used forged documents would face cancellation of admission and legal proceedings. The spokesman added that the responsibility for issuing fake mark sheets lay with the education boards.
The case strikes at the heart of one of Pakistan's most competitive admission processes. Every year, tens of thousands of students sit the MDCAT for a limited number of seats in public medical colleges, and even a handful of marks can decide who wins a place and who does not. The allegation that marks were inflated by dozens of points for some candidates raises the prospect that deserving students may have lost seats to others whose records were altered.
What happens next will depend on how far the verification spreads. The Sindh High Court has already forced one round of checks, and the universities' own scrutiny is continuing. If other boards and universities follow the same process, more cases could surface — and the authorities will face pressure to explain how the tampering happened, who was responsible, and what will happen to the admissions already granted on the basis of the suspect documents.
For the candidates whose mark sheets have now been declared tampered with, the consequences could be severe, including the loss of their hard-won medical seats. For the thousands of students who sat the examinations honestly, the board's declaration is at least a sign that the system is being checked — but it will take a full and transparent inquiry to restore confidence in a process on which so many young people's futures depend.
