Universities will prepare merit lists for undergraduate (UG) admissions using the normalised scores and not percentiles in the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) scorecards, University Grants Commission (UGC) chairperson M Jagadesh Kumar said on Friday.
The National Testing Agency (NTA) announced the results of the first university entrance test for UG admissions on Friday. The scorecards students have received have percentiles and normalised scores, creating confusion about what exactly will decide admissions.
Kumar said the normalised scores are just like the marks one gets while the percentile gives the position of a student among a group of students. “...if a candidate’s percentile is 85, it means that there are 85 people who got less than that candidate’s marks. The person might have got 52 out of 100 and his or her percentile can be 85. It would mean there are 85 students who got less than 52 marks.”
Kumar said NTA conducted exams for a given subject in separate shifts. “For each shift, the percentiles are calculated. ...it is humanly impossible to have identical difficulty levels in each shift.” He said in shift one, someone can get 82 percentile and 68 marks. “...in another session, another student might have got the same 82 percentile but he might have got only 57 marks. It means the difficulty level in the second session was more than the first session,” he said.
“Now, how do you compare these two students? Although both have the same percentile, one student has 68 marks and the other has 52. So, here, we used the equipercentile method to normalise the marks to bring difficulty levels across the sessions on the same scale. That will give you the normalised score.”
{{/usCountry}}“Now, how do you compare these two students? Although both have the same percentile, one student has 68 marks and the other has 52. So, here, we used the equipercentile method to normalise the marks to bring difficulty levels across the sessions on the same scale. That will give you the normalised score.”
{{/usCountry}}He said that is the reason why students have varying normalised scores and percentiles. “The students do not need to worry because all universities will use only normalised scores to prepare their merit lists. That has taken care of the difference between the difficult levels across all sessions.”
NTA said around 20,000 students have scored 100 percentile across 30 subjects but normalised scores of these students vary. It added a committee of professors from Delhi’s Indian Statistical Institution, the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, and the University of Delhi, decided to use the equipercentile.
NTA said CUET-UG was conducted over six weeks and that tests in a subject were held on different days. “So naturally the question that arises is how are we going to compare the performance of different students on a common scale since they have written the test in the same subject but on different days. We need to ensure that the admissions are made based on a score that accurately compares the performance of the students,” NTA said in a statement.
The CUET-UG exam was initially planned in two phases. It was conducted in six phases due to multiple cancellations and postponement of papers due to technical issues at examination centres.