The central universities across India will now be putting together the rank list based on the results of the Common University Entrance Test Undergraduate (CUET UG) results. The merit list will not be prepared considering the percentile of the marks but “normalised” scores issued by the National Testing Agency (NTA).

Here are the details of the normalisation process:

1. The need for normalisation is that for several subjects the CUET UG 2022 has been conducted in different shifts. The question paper for any subject in different shifts of the examination is different and, therefore, it is possible that despite all the efforts to maintain equivalence among various question papers, the difficulty level of these question papers administered in different sessions may not be the same.

2. This ‘normalisation’ was decided by a committee headed by a senior professor from the Indian Statistical Institution Delhi and other mentors including senior professors from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and the University of Delhi.

3. This percentile cannot be used while deciding the ranks for the entrance tests, such as the CUET UG, because the test is conducted on different days and there are multiple sessions for the same subject. This will result in multiple percentiles for each group of students. Moreover, another problem with using only percentiles is that subjects, such as Sports or Fine Arts, are given some weightage given to the skill component by some universities.

4. Because the NTA employs a single scale for all candidates regardless of when they first appeared in a subject, their performance is comparable between sessions. These normalised marks of the candidates, obtained using the equi-percentile method, in different sessions in a given subject can be used in the same way we use the raw marks of a conventional single-session examination.

5. The normalisation is not done for all entrance examinations in the country because the CUET UG has a number of subjects whereas other examinations are limited to fewer subjects. In single-session entrance tests, the established method to transform raw marks into a common uniform scale is using the percentile methods so that the performance of students can be weighed.