Prof Kumar made the reiteration in a statement after many students complained that despite performing well their normalised scores are much lower compared to their “actual scores based on the answer keys”.
“Normalization causes neither benefit nor loss to the students. Since they are writing in different sessions and the difficulty levels are different, even if they got same marks in two different sessions, when the difficulty levels are taken into account, the normalized marks will be different. This is the essence of equi-percentile method,” Prof Kumar said.
The CUET score card contains both percentile and normalised marks of the student in each subject. Percentiles indicate the relative performance of a student among a set of students who wrote the test in a given shift in a subject.
“Using the equipercentile method, the percentiles of the students are converted into normalised marks taking into account the difficulty levels of multiple sessions. The difficulty levels vary from session to session in the same subject. That is why it is quite possible that in the score card you may see that in one subject the percentile is higher than the normalised marks and in another subject, the percentile is lower than the normalised marks,” Prof Kumar said.
He also added that students need not worry about these differences as the normalisation formula was drawn up by a panel of experts from Indian Statistical Institute, IIT Delhi and Delhi University.
While the normalisation method offers a level playing field, a situation is also possible where two aspirants, with the same combination of subjects, take the exam in two different days and face some amount of disadvantage despite solving their respective question papers correctly.
Purely going by the answer keys, both could have had similar marks but after applying the normalisation formula, the scores of the two candidates will inevitably be different.
However, while in the hypothetical situation described above, one student is likely to face some disadvantage, not applying the normalisation formula will result in a situation where students of an entire session might lose out to another batch who may have attempted an easier question paper.
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