The results for the debut edition of the Common University Entrance Test for undergraduate admissions were declared on Friday, National Testing Agency officials said. The CUET-UG results were scheduled to be declared by 10 pm on Thursday. However, the NTA said post-midnight that there will be a delay citing a huge database. “The merit lists will be prepared by participating universities, who will decide about their individual counselling on the basis of the CUET-UG score card,” said Sadhana Parashar, senior director (exams), NTA. The first edition of CUET-UG, the gateway for undergraduate admissions in all central universities, began in July and concluded on August 30.
Sixty per cent attendance was recorded in the exam. According to Parashar, the performance of every candidate was evaluated using the “equi-percentile method”. Under this method, normalised marks of every candidate were calculated using the percentiles of each group of students in a given session across multiple days for the same subject.
“For several subjects, CUET-UG was conducted in different shifts. Since the question papers for any subject in different shifts are different and it is quite possible that despite all best possible efforts to maintain equivalence among various question papers, the difficulty level of these question papers administered in different sessions may not be the same or similar,” she said. “Some of the candidates might have ended up attempting a relatively tougher set of questions as compared to other sets. The candidates who attempted the comparatively tougher examination are likely to get lower marks as compared to those who attempted the easier one.
“The scores of the students across shifts are not directly comparable. Hence, there was a need for normalising the marks across shifts to make them amenable to such comparisons,” she added. According to the initial plan, CUET-UG was scheduled to conclude on August 20. However, the exam was further deferred and split into six phases to accommodate students whose exam was rescheduled due to several glitches.
Technical glitches, last-minute changes in exam centres, uninformed changes in exam dates and admit cards mentioning past dates were some of the issues faced by students during the exam. University Grants Commission (UGC) chairman M Jagadesh Kumar had earlier said the exam was cancelled at several centres following reports of “sabotage”.
With 14.9 lakh registrations, the CUET is now the second biggest entrance exam in the country, surpassing JEE-Main’s average registration of nine lakh. NEET-UG is the biggest entrance test in India with an average of 18 lakh applicants.