The National Testing Agency (NTA) will follow a percentile-based normalisation formula to address the varying difficulty levels of question papers on a particular subject in the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) for undergraduate courses.
The CUET-UG started on July 15 and ended on August 30. In CUET, a student was supposed to appear in at least one language paper, one subject domain paper and a paper on general studies. However, a student can opt for a maximum of six domain subjects to enhance their admission possibility to more than one institution. There were 27 different subject options to choose from.
The challenge before the NTA was how to ensure that the admissions are made based on a score that accurately compares the performance of the students. With help from experts from the Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi, the NTA has developed the normalisation method.“A solution to this situation is the use of a method called the equipercentile method. In this 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. This is done for every session across multiple days for the same subject. These percentiles are then equated, and converted into normalised marks,” said an NTA note explaining the normalisation procedure.
The percentile score of a student is obtained by dividing the number of students below him by the number who appeared, the ratio multiplied by 100. The topper of each session will get the same percentile of 100. The marks obtained in between the highest and lowest scores will also be converted to appropriate percentiles.
According to the NTA note, step 1 of the normalisation process is to calculate the percentile of the students in each shift by using the raw marks of the students. The data across all sessions tabulated at the end of step 1 is collated into a single table with columns for separate shift-wise raw scores. All the records are then sorted in the decreasing order of the percentiles, which gives the merit order in the subject.
The NTA has allowed students to modify their details and preference for university. While submitting applications, students have already indicated their preferences for university. But this step of the NTA will help students to increase their preference for institutions.Delhi University (DU) has started registering candidates for admission to its colleges. It came across cases of some students facing difficulty logging into the University of Delhi’s Common Seat Allocation System because they had not indicated DU as their preferred university. Now the NTA is allowing the correction of “student particulars” in the online application form of CUET. This correction window is available till 10am on September 15, 2022. Candidates can modify their choice of university. This year 6.14 lakh students have already shown a preference for admission into DU’s 67 colleges with 70,000 seats.
