CUET is assessed on equipercentile method; Here’s what we know about it

New Delhi: The largest exam in the country and the first-ever common entrance exam to universities and colleges across the nation – CUET, the National Testing Agency (NTA) will be opting for a method called ‘equipercentile.’

The Common University Entrance Test (CUET) UG 2022 was conducted in six phases between July 15 and August 30. Students could choose from 27 different subjects for the CUET UG where they could also opt for a combination of these subjects. This would help many students who could have been given tests for the same subjects on different days and in different sessions.

For fair assessment, CUET students will be marked on equipercentile method, the UGC Chairman M Jagadesh Kumar explained to The Indian Express.

Under this method, normalized marks of each candidate are calculated using the percentile of each group of students who appeared for the same subjects but on different days in a given session. For fair evaluation, the same scale is used for all candidates regardless of the session they have appeared in. This would make their marks comparable across the different sessions.

The normal marks of the candidates in a particular subject can be used in the same way as raw marks in a conventional single-session exam, the chairman explained.

To calculate the normalised marks in a subject across sessions, the percentile of students from each group for each shift is evaluated using the raw marks.

For students who have appeared in a test in the same subjects but in different shifts, their percentile for the given subject is first calculated using their raw marks and arranged in decreasing order. Their raw marks for each shift are also noted corresponding to the percentiles.

Besides, students who appeared in Shift 1 will have no raw marks in Shift 2 and vice versa. A method known as interpolation is used to calculate the missing marks. This is a mathematical method to estimate the marks of students absent in a shift but who have given the test in some other shift.

This method allows for the calculation of percentile value for each candidate. After this, the average of the actual marks of each student in the one shift and the raw marks scored by them is calculated using the interpolation method in the other shift.