NTA Clarifies Normalisation For JEE Main 2024; 8 Students Achieve 100 Percentile In Jan 27 Exam

The clarification was issued in response to numerous candidates who took to social media to voice their concerns over the alleged discrepancies in the results.

A total of 11,70,036 candidates appeared for JEE Main paper 1 in the January session.

Source : Getty

The National Testing Agency (NTA) has released a notification addressing various concerns raised by students following the declaration of the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) 2024 Main session 1 results. Responding to the numerous candidates who expressed their apprehensions regarding potential discrepancies in the results on social media, NTA issued clarifications. A total of 11,70,036 candidates appeared for JEE Main paper 1 in the January session. Many students alleged notable disparities between their JEE Main marks and percentiles, with concerns particularly surrounding the January 27 and 29 exam shifts, which reportedly disadvantaged some students.

According to NTA data, 8 students achieved a 100 percentile score in shift 1 of the January 27 JEE Main 2024. Additionally, both shift 1 and shift 2 on January 27 saw 1.22 lakh and 1.25 lakh candidates respectively, accounting for 10% and 10.3% of total candidates.

 "JEE Main session 1 has been conducted as per the norms and procedures followed for the conduct of any high-stakes examination, NTA ensured that the examination provided fair and equal opportunity for all candidates," NTA said.

NTA official notification read, "As per the norms followed by NTA, various question papers of a similar nature in content were prepared and randomly selected for each shift without knowledge of the difficulty level of each question paper. The varied difficulty level in question papers is an inherent part and parcel of multi-shift examination and thus normalisation is the preferred mode for deciding scores. There is no equivalence between raw scores and normalised scores".

"The 'Normalization procedure based on Percentile Score' was used to ensure that candidates were neither benefitted nor disadvantaged due to the difficulty level of the examination," the notification added.

JEE Main 2024: Understanding Normalisation Process

JEE Main exam is conducted across multiple shifts to accommodate candidates, the difficulty level of question papers may vary between these shifts. The normalisation process in JEE Main is designed to ensure fairness by equalising the difficulty level across shifts, thereby preventing any candidate from being unfairly advantaged or disadvantaged. This normalisation process takes into account that the overall ability of a candidate remains constant, regardless of the specific difficulty level of their shift. The National Testing Agency (NTA) oversees this process, which aims to create a uniform candidate distribution across all shifts.

The normalisation methodology was developed based on the recommendations of an expert committee comprising professors from prestigious institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc). The initial report was formulated in November 2018 and underwent review in October 2020 to ensure its effectiveness and fairness in assessing candidates' performances across different shifts.