CUET UG 2023 Result: With the Common University Entrance Test, Undergraduate (CUET UG) 2023 result expected this week, candidates should be aware of how the National Testing Agency (NTA) allots marks for this exam.
The NTA follows the technique of normalization of marks for several of the competitive exams conducted by the agency, including the CUET UG.
What is the normalization process?
The CUET UG exam is held on different days and in different shifts, across several exam centres in India and abroad. Due to this, there are different sets of question papers for every subject, which makes it difficult for the agency to maintain the same level of difficulty for all exams.
“In addition to the above difficulty, in subjects such as sports or fine arts, some weightage (e.g. 25%) is given to the skill component by some universities. However, adding raw marks of the skill component and the remaining weightage (75%) of percentile cannot be done to prepare the rank list because it would be like adding oranges to apples,” UGC Chief explained in indianexpress.com.
Thus, the NTA uses the normalization method. This normalization formula ensures that candidates are neither benefitted nor disadvantaged due to any such factor.
In CUET UG, raw scores are converted into percentile scores and then into normalized scores. However, the universities are instructed to consider only the normalized raw score while preparing merit lists. NTA claimed that this method has proven 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.
How is a normalized score calculated?
To calculate the normalized score for CUET UG candidates, three variables are required: the raw score of the candidate (A), the total number of candidates with a score equal to or less than her raw score (B), and the total number of candidates in that particular session (C).
For example, take the case of a student who appears in a session with 41,326 other candidates. Say, she obtains 121 marks, scoring more than 37,244 other candidates in her session. Her normalised percentile score will be 37,244/41,326X100, which comes to 90.1224411. Percentile scores will be calculated up to 7 decimal places.
What is the formula to calculate a normalized raw score?
First, the NTA sorts the candidates in descending order on the basis of their percentile scores, after which their raw marks are listed against their percentiles. A third metric called ‘interpolated mark’ is then calculated for each candidate using a method called linear interpolation.
This mathematical concept is applied to find the interpolated marks for every student, assuming that every student appeared on the same paper twice. Their actual raw marks were then divided by the interpolated marks, and the normalized marks will be computed.