While allocating seats to undergraduate applicants under the Common Seat Allocation System (CSAS), Delhi University (DU) has relied much less on tie-breaking rules this year.
Officials attribute this change to the National Testing Agency (NTA) providing "normalised" Common University Entrance Test (CUET) scores up to seven decimal points rather than "raw" scores.
“Last year, the CUET scores provided by NTA were raw, and we had to apply tie-breaking criteria in many cases. But this year, because of the precision of normalised scores, it became easier to allocate seats purely on CUET scores. Tie-breakers were used only in a few cases,” a senior university official told The Indian Express.
However, this year, because of the precision of normalised scores, it became easier to allocate seats based solely on CUET scores. Tiebreakers were only employed in a few circumstances.
Last year, if two students had the same CUET score for a specific course and college, DU had to go deeper — compare their Class 12 grades, verify their ages, and, in some cases, even go by whose name came first alphabetically — to determine who would get the seat, The Indian Express reported.
This was because the NTA exchanged raw scores, which frequently overlapped.
However, this year, the NTA provided scores precise to 7 decimal points — for example, 741.7355297 — making it much less likely that two students would have the same score. This meant that, in most circumstances, DU could rely solely on the CUET score, thereby eliminating the need for tiebreakers.
While DU has more than 71,000 undergraduate seats, it has only allocated 93,166 seats thus far, implying that internal shifting and re-allocations will occur in later rounds, as observed in previous admission cycles.
As of Monday evening, 80,015 students have accepted their college allocations, with 31,088 applications approved by their respective college administrations, reported The Indian Express.
In response to challenges faced last year, DU altered its tie-breaking rules for 2025-26 admissions. Now, the alphabetical order of names, which was previously the final resort, has been replaced by Class 10 marks.
