The National Testing Agency on Friday declared the result for the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) for undergraduate admissions in which more than eight lakh students had participated.
Of the 21,159 candidates who scored 100 percentile in the maiden edition of the test, 12,799 were women candidates and 8,360 male.
English was the favourite subject among candidates. A total of 4,85,894 candidates appeared for the English paper, followed by Chemistry (2,31,970), Maths (2,29,793), Physics (2,20,014) and Hindi (1,80,634).
Sanskrit recorded the highest percentage of students with 100 percentile score, at 23% of the 5,002 students who appeared for the subject. Among students who appeared for psychology, 5.9% had 100 percentile score, while 1.95% had the top score in political science, 1.6% in English, .03% in maths and .02% in physics.
‘Equipercentiles’
The marking scheme involved giving students “equipercentiles”, where every student who appeared on a particular day in a specific subject was given a certain percentile. These percentiles for students appearing in the same subject on different days were then equated and converted into normalised marks.
The exam was conducted on 20 days and in 38 slots from July 15 to August 30. It was held in 259 cities across India and nine outside the country. The massive exercise involved a total of 2,219 question papers in 13 mediums.
The role of the NTA is confined to registration of candidates, conduct of the test, hosting of answer key, inviting challenges, finalising answer keys, preparing and declaring result and hosting score cards. The merit list of students will be prepared by the participating universities. They will also take a decision on counselling for students on the basis of the score card.
Now, students will be required to visit the admission portal of individual universities, fill online applications and submit the required documents. The NTA will provide the scores of the students to the participating universities for verification, according to the Chairperson of the University Grants Commission M. Jagadesh Kumar.
Six weeks to conclude admission process
On the expected time frame within which universities may complete the admission procedure for undergraduate courses, Dr. Kumar said, “Once the CUET-UG scores are announced, universities may typically take about six weeks to conclude the admission process as they may issue first list, second list and so on until most of the seats are filled. Either in October last week or November first week, most universities may attempt to start their new academic session.”
The exam was marred by several technical issues, including the announcement of result which was delayed by over seven hours.
On several test days, the exam had to be cancelled after a delay in uploading the question paper. Students also received details of their exam centres very late resulting in many missing their exam. As a result, the NTA delisted 53 exam centres and cautioned them against “sabotage”.
Students with grievances were allowed to re-appear on a later date. Though these issues led to widespread criticism, the UGC Chairman told The Hindu earlier that machine-driven, multiple-choice question type of exam ensured a transparent, bias-free admission process and a centralised exam such as the CUET helped provide an opportunity to students from across the country to apply to some of the best universities in the country.
