The National Testing Agency (NTA) will release the results of the maiden common university entrance test for undergraduate admissions or CUET-UG on Thursday, official said, adding that the result will be prepared using “equipercentile method” to normalize scores of candidates appeared access different phases of the exam.
The NTA on Wednesday also reopened the correction window to allow candidates edit their personal details till 10 am on Thursday.
The debut edition of CUET-UG was conducted in six phases between July 15 and August 30 by the National Testing Agency (NTA). The exam has been conducted across 489 examination centers located in 259 cities across India and 10 cities outside India. A total 14,90,000 candidates had registered for the examination that witnessed 60% consolidated attendance in all six phases.
According a statement issued by NTA on Wednesday, a committee headed by senior professors from Indian Statistical Institution DelhI, iIndian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi and the University of Delhi, had detailed deliberations and decided to use “equipercentile method” to give scores to students for CUET-UG.
“The CUET-UG was conducted over a period of six weeks with tests in a given subject 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,” the NTA said in a statement.
{{/usCountry}}“The CUET-UG was conducted over a period of six weeks with tests in a given subject 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,” the NTA said in a statement.
{{/usCountry}}According to the NTA, under the equipercentile method, the percentile for each candidate is calculated using the raw marks of the candidate as compared to the raw marks of others in the same session. “Let us say in a given shift, 100 students have appeared for the test. We sort their marks in decreasing order. Let us assume that one student among these 100 students has scored 87 % marks. Now let us assume that 80 out 100 students have secured less than or equal to 87% marks. The percentile of this student with 87% marks would be 80/100=0⋅8. The percentile so calculated will always be between 0 and 1 and it is usually rounded off to the requisite number of decimal places,” the agency said.
The NTA further used a method called “interpolation” to mark students for the shift they did not appear for. “Interpolation is a mathematical way of estimating missing marks of the students who are absent in one shift because they have already taken the test in the other shift,” the agency said.
“Each percentile value of the candidates is sorted in a descending order having marks for both shifts i.e raw marks and interpolated marks. Raw marks are available in the shift where the student has written the test and interpolated marks are estimated in the other shift because the student could not have written the test for a second time in the same subject. For each student, we then calculate the average of the actual raw marks in one shift and the marks obtained using interpolation in the other shift. This will give the normalized marks for the corresponding percentile of each candidate as shown below,” the NTA statement added.
“This method has been shown to be accurate for estimating normalized marks of candidates when the tests are held in multiple sessions with varying difficulty levels in a given subject,” it added.
The score card of a candidate will have percentiles and normalised marks. Universities need to use the normalized marks given in the scorecard for preparing the ranking list for admissions.