NEW DELHI: As many as 22,000 candidates scored 100 percentile in the Common University Entrance Test-Undergraduate (CUET-UG), whose results were announced by the National Testing Agency (NTA) on Saturday.
The much-anticipated results showed that after English, the maximum top scorers were in Biology and Economics.
In subjects such as Accountancy, Biology, Business Studies, Economics, English, History, and Political Science, more than 1000 students got 100 percentile scores.
NTA will now provide normalized scores to the 250 participating universities.
“They can use these scores to prepare the merit list for admission to UG programs,” University Grants Commission (UGC) Chairman Prof M. Jagadesh Kumar told this paper. The universities have been instructed to consider only the normalised raw score while preparing merit lists, he explained.
“I am glad we could announce the CUET-UG results as planned on July 15,” he added.
However, soon after the results were announced many students took to social media to vent their frustration over the scoring system. Many said their scores were much higher than the calculated aggregate or normalised scores.
However, according to Sadhana Parashar, Senior Director of, the National Testing Agency (NTA), “The performance of every candidate has been evaluated using the equi-percentile method wherein normalised marks of each candidate have been calculated using the percentiles of each group of students in a given session across multiple days for the same subject.”
She said the role of the NTA is confined to the registration of candidates, the conduct of the test, hosting answer keys, inviting challenges, finalising answer keys, preparing and declaring results, and hosting scorecards.
"A merit list will be prepared by participating universities and organisations. The universities will decide about their counselling based on the scorecard of CUET (UG) - 2023 provided by NTA," she added.
Nearly 14.99 lakh students registered and over 11.11 lakh candidates appeared for the second edition of the entrance exam, which went off smoothly as compared to the first edition.
Over 8.03 lakh male students, 6.96 lakh female students and 16 transgender students registered for the exam this year. The exam was held across 295 cities including 23 cities abroad, including Dubai, Kathmandu, Muscat, Riyadh, Sharjah, Singapore, Kuwait City, Ottawa, Oslo, Port Louis, Sydney, Moscow, Vienna, and Washington DC.
While 5,685 candidates scored 100 percentile in English, 4,850 candidates got a top score in Biology/Biotechnology/Biochemistry, followed by 2,836 in Economics.
NTA conducted the test in nine phases over 34 days from May 21 to July 5.
The exam was held in 13 languages. Kumar said the five most preferred languages in CUET-UG were Bengali, English, Hindi, Malayalam and Tamil.
There were 2200 subject experts and 800 translators involved in preparing 2305 question papers and 148520 questions.
The CUET-UG is the second-largest entrance exam in the country in terms of the number of applicants. In its first edition, 12.5 lakh students had registered for the exam and 9.9 lakh had submitted their applications.
This year, NTA said they saw a huge rise in the number of applicants. Unlike last year, the exam was conducted in three shifts this year.
Over 91,000 students who were registered from Jammu and Kashmir and were allotted examination centres out of the state took the exam from May 21 to May 26 following a furore. In Srinagar alone, over 12,000 students took the exam. In riot-hit Manipur exams were also held from May 29 onwards.
Though there was much jubilation as a record number of students got 100 percentile, there were many who took on NTA on social media.
Unhappy with their normalised score, one student tweeted: "What an awesome result by nta cuet 2023... We students worked hard to get marks. And our raw score was much good compared to this normalised score. @ntaofficialinn decreased our marks blindly. Well done nta team.. You are doing a great job. #CUETUG2023."
Another candidate, Abhishek Sharma, tweeted, "TAKE A NOTE OF THIS SERIOUS MATTER; I was getting 758 as a raw score in CUET now that score dragged down to 681 that's like -77. This is a serious issue. Please look into that matter."
