ROME -- Protests and sit-ins took place Tuesday outside various hospitals and at the capital’s La Sapienza University against the cap on the number of medicine students being accepted onto university courses.

 Medicine and dentistry admission tests were held Tuesday morning, but the number of applicants that will be accepted is still measured according to an estimate made on a national level for the 2015-16 academic year, despite a current increase of 2,000 applicants this year in relation to last.

 The number of hopeful doctors taking the tests this year are 62,695, whilst the number of places is still 10,132, breaking down into 9,224 for medicine and 908 for dentistry. This means that that one in every six candidates will get in.

 The students at the Sapienza sit-in wanted to hammer home a resounding “no to the cap”. “The quota closes hospitals,” the students from the union Link say, wearing white shirts with signs around their necks reading “I wanted to have a medical examination but the hospital was closed.”

 The student organization Udu and the communist youth were also protesting. “These tests are not able to judge students correctly,” says Elisa Marchetti from Udu, with a flash mob taking place next to her, demonstrating this point by picking ‘candidates’ according to their hair colour and star sign.

 Many students were also protesting against this same cap outside various hospitals, with the intention of then carrying on the protest at La Sapienza University’s Faculty of Medicine or outside other big universities.

 This student action was coordinated by the Union of Students, the Link association of students and the Network of Knowledge organization, whose coordinator, Martina Campani denounces the admission test. “For years we have been asking for a rethink of the assessment procedures for the degree course in medicine, which are revealing themselves to be not only inefficient, but also detrimental. Even the Medical Association has started to put this set-up into question,” she says.

 There has also been an overnight ‘blitz’ at the MIUR - Ministry of Education, University and Research in Rome, for the same cause. Elisa Marchetti, the national coordinator of Udu, says that through this action “we wanted to reaffirm in any way possible our aversion to this student cap. In response to the dramatic fall in students applying to university, the Ministry acts in the worst way possible by reducing the number of places. Due to this, so many students are repelled from universities and they are denied the possibility of choosing their own futures.”

 nkd