The much-awaited debut Common University Entrance Test - Undergraduate (CUET-UG) 2022 results were finally announced early Friday, September 16 with the University Grants Commission chairman Prof M Jagadesh Kumar stressing that the admission to undergraduate courses in central universities in India would be through the ‘normalised’ marks and not percentile or raw marks.
Speaking with The New Indian Express, Kumar said that students should not worry if they see the difference in their normalised marks and answer keys.
He also hoped that the 90 universities would come up with a merit list to start admission for undergraduate courses within ten days based on normalised marks.
His clarification came after the National Testing Agency (NTA) announced that 21,159 — 12,799 girls and 8360 boys — students scored 100 percentile.
Maximum students (8236) scored 100 percentile in English, followed by Political Science (2,065) and Business Studies (1,669). The other subjects that got substantial 100 percentile scores are — Biology/Biotechnology (1,319), and Economics/Business Eco. (1,187), Psychology (1,186), Sanskrit (1,166) History (893), Hindi (875) Sociology (261)
The news of the high percentile led to panic among students and parents, who spent an anxious long night awaiting the result, which was announced at 4 am Friday, September 16 instead of 10 pm Thursday, September 15 and started bombarding social media on whether the percentile would decide admissions into universities. Many complained that their scores have been downgraded in the name of 'normalisation.'
Most of them posted their scorecards which reflected the difference between their normalised scores and the raw marks they had received from the NTA, which had conducted the exam in six phases from July 15 to August 30. The NTA had earlier shared the answer key with the students.
Clarifying the doubts, the University Grants Commission had told TNIE, “The normalised marks will take into account the difference in the difficulty levels across the sessions.”
He further explained that students in two different sessions might have the same percentile, but when the normalisation is done, the difficulty level of each session is considered. So, the normalised marks will be different from the percentiles.
“Some say they got 80 percentile, but in normalised marks, it has come down to 60. They have to understand that the normalised marks are different from the percentile. If one gets 82 percentile, 82 people get less than his marks. It is then converted into normalised marks, which are the real marks considering the difficulty level,” he said.
“Students need not worry if they see that their normalised marks are different from the percentiles. Without normalisation, the ranking list will be highly skewed because of the difficulty levels. We have used the scientific method of normalising the performance of the students who gave the exams in different sessions,” he said, adding that it was done to provide a level playing field to all students who took the debut exam on the same subject on different days or shifts.
The performance of every candidate was evaluated using the equi-percentile method wherein normalised marks of each candidate were calculated using the percentiles of each group of students in a given session across multiple days for the same subject.
The process was carried out by a committee headed by a senior professor from the Indian Statistical Institution, Delhi and comprising senior professors from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi and Delhi University, he said, adding that results have been shared with the universities.
The need for normalisation arose because the CUET-UG were conducted in different shifts and as the question paper for each shift was different, it was not possible to maintain equivalence in various question papers, or to assess their difficulty level, as some students would have got a relatively difficult question as compared to others. So to keep parity, the need was felt for normalising the marks.
Technical glitches, last-minute changes in exam centres, uninformed changes in exam dates and delays in issuing admit cards, some even mentioning past dates, were some of the many issues faced by students during the exam.
With 14.9 lakh registrations, the CUET is now the second biggest entrance exam in the country, surpassing the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) -Main average registration of nine lakh. Sixty per cent attendance was recorded in the CUET-UG exam. National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET-UG) is the most prominent entrance test in India, with an average of 18 lakh applicants.
