E-Paper
CUET: CBSE bags over 16k hundredth percentile scores
The NTA announced the results of the maiden CUET-UG on Friday, with 21,159 hundredth percentile scores recorded in over 60 subjects. The number represents multiple hundredth percentile scores being counted separately, even if attained by the same student.
Students from the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) comprised 79.3% of the total 100 percentile scored in at least one subject in the Common University Entrance Test for undergraduate admissions (CUET-UG) this year, according to the data compiled by the National Testing Agency (NTA), which conducted the nation-wide test.
The NTA announced the results of the maiden CUET-UG on Friday, with 21,159 hundredth percentile scores recorded in over 60 subjects. The number represents multiple hundredth percentile scores being counted separately, even if attained by the same student.
According to NTA, of these 21,159 scores, 16,771 were obtained by students from the CBSE board. This was followed by the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examination, or CISCE (1049), State Board of High School and Intermediate Education in Uttar Pradesh (906), and Bihar School Examination Board (286).
Students from the Tamil Nadu State Board of School Examinations received 252 hundredth percentile scores.
To be sure, officials aware of the matter said around 80% candidates who took CUET were also from CBSE, though the exact number was not immediately available.
“The maximum students who took the exam were from CBSE board, and therefore, the largest number of top-scoring students were from the same board,” said a senior NTA official, who wished not to be named.
Sudha Acharya, chairperson of the National Progressive School Conference (NPSC) — which represents more than 120 Delhi schools — said many educators and students were of the view that the CUET-UG failed to achieve the purpose it set out to, an argument she said was burnished by CBSE students dominating the hundredth percentile count.
“We were told that the exam will bring parity among various boards and the problem of too many high-scorers will be solved. That has not happened if the maximum high scorers are from CBSE,” she said.
While the percentile represents the relative performance of a student — being in the hundredth percentile means they were virtually better than 100% of the others (this number is in reality likely to be a minute decimal point away from 100) — a second metric will determine college admissions: the “normalised score”.
Since the CUET was held over multiple days and sessions, students sat for the same subjects in different shifts, with different questions. The normalised score is a process in which any difference in difficulty levels between these shifts is statistically removed to make the performance of all students comparable, irrespective of which specific questions they attempted.
In terms of subject-wise performance, of the 21,159 hundredth percentile subject scores, most were in English (8,236) followed by political science (2,065), business studies (1,669), biology (1,324) and economics (1,188).
Humanities subjects had more 100 percentile scores than science subjects.
In mathematics, only 82 students were in the hundredth percentile, while in Physics, this number was 59 and in Chemistry 156
While the CUET scorecards issued by the National Testing Agency mentions percentile as well as normalised scores of the candidates, the University Grants Commission said on Friday that it will be the normalised scores that will be considered for admissions.
A total 1,490,000 candidates registered for the examination that witnessed 60% consolidated attendance in all six phases
