1.0 Introduction: Understanding Your CUET Score
Welcome! If you’re preparing for the Common University Entrance Test (CUET), you’re taking a significant step towards your future. As you focus on your subjects, it’s also important to understand how your performance will be evaluated. Exam scoring, especially with technical terms like “normalization,” can often seem complex and confusing.
The goal of this article is to break down the entire CUET scoring process into simple, easy-to-understand steps. We’ll guide you through how your individual answers are marked, how these marks are combined into a raw score, and finally, how that raw score is converted into the final normalized score that universities use for admissions.
Let’s begin with the most fundamental building block of your score: the marking scheme for each question.
2.0 The First Step: How Each of Your Answers is Marked
The foundation of your CUET score is a straightforward marking system that rewards correct answers and penalizes incorrect ones. Understanding this system is crucial for developing a smart test-taking strategy.
| Response Type | Marks Awarded/Deducted | Key Insight for Students |
| Correct Answer | +5 Marks | Every correct answer significantly boosts your score. |
| Incorrect Answer | -1 Mark | There is a penalty for guessing wrong, so accuracy is crucial. |
| Unattempted Question | 0 Marks | It’s better to skip a question you’re unsure about than to guess and lose a mark. |
A special note from the NTA: In the rare case that a question is found to have more than one correct option, you will receive +5 marks only if you have selected one of the officially correct options.
Understanding the “Marked for Review” Status
A common point of confusion for students is the “Marked for Review” option. This feature is a tool to help you remember which questions you want to revisit. However, how it’s evaluated depends on whether you’ve selected an answer or not.
- Answered and Marked for Review: If you select an answer for a question and also mark it for review, this answer will be considered for evaluation. You have effectively answered the question but left a reminder to double-check it if you have time.
- Unanswered and Marked for Review: If you do not select an answer but simply mark a question for review, it will not be considered for evaluation. This is treated the same as an unattempted question and will receive zero marks.
With this understanding of how individual answers are scored, let’s see how they come together to form your raw score.
3.0 From Individual Answers to Your Raw Score
Your “raw score” is the initial score you get on a test paper based purely on the number of correct and incorrect answers you’ve given. It’s the direct result of the marking scheme applied to your responses.
The official formula for calculating the raw score is as follows:
Total Raw Score = (Number of Correct Answers × 5) – (Number of Incorrect Answers × 1)
Let’s Walk Through an Example
Imagine you took a CUET test paper with the following results:
- Total Questions Attempted: 50
- Correct Answers: 40
- Incorrect Answers: 8
- Unattempted Questions: 2
Using the formula, your raw score would be calculated like this:
(40 × 5) – (8 × 1) = 200 – 8 = 192
Your raw score for this paper would be 192. Notice that the two unattempted questions have no impact on the calculation, as they are worth zero marks.
This raw score is an important first step, but it is not the final score that will be used for your university admissions. Because the CUET is held on different days and in different shifts, a further step is needed to ensure fairness for every student.
4.0 The Fairness Factor: Why Your Score Needs to be “Normalized”
The National Testing Agency (NTA) conducts the CUET exam for a vast number of students, which requires a multi-day, multi-shift schedule. This presents a challenge that “normalization” is designed to solve.
Here’s the problem the NTA addresses with score normalization:
- The CUET exam is conducted in multiple shifts on different days.
- The question papers for any given subject are different in each shift.
- Despite the NTA’s best efforts to maintain equivalence, the difficulty level between these papers might not be exactly the same.
- This could create an unfair situation. A student attempting a tougher paper might get a lower raw score than a student of the same ability who happened to get an easier paper.
Normalization is the statistical process used to adjust for these differences in difficulty across shifts. Its purpose is to ensure that a student’s score is not affected by the particular paper they attempted. This creates a fair and equitable platform for comparing the performance of all students, regardless of which shift they were in. This aligns with the NTA’s core objective to conduct “efficient, transparent, and international standardized tests” that are fair for every candidate. The specific statistical method used for this process is called the “Equi-percentile method.”
Now that we understand why normalization is necessary, let’s look at a simplified explanation of how it works.
5.0 How Normalization Works: The Equi-Percentile Method Explained Simply
The goal of this section is to explain the concept behind the equi-percentile method, not the complex mathematics involved. The core idea is to place every student on a common scale.
Here are the simplified steps of the process:
- Calculating Percentiles For each exam shift, the raw scores of all students are converted into percentiles. A percentile score indicates the percentage of students in that same shift who scored equal to or less than a particular student. For instance, if your score is in the 90th percentile for your shift, it means you scored as well as or better than 90% of the students who took the test in that same session. It essentially ranks your performance relative to your peers in the same session.
- Creating a Common Scale The equi-percentile method then links the percentile of a candidate in one shift to the raw scores of candidates in other shifts who are at the very same percentile. This process effectively maps everyone’s performance onto a single, unified scale.
- Determining the Normalized Score Your final “normalized score” (also called the NTA Score) is determined through this fair comparison. By using percentiles as a bridge, the process ensures that it doesn’t matter whether you took an easier or a harder version of the test. Your final score reflects your performance relative to all candidates who took the test for that subject, across all shifts.
6.0 Your Score’s Journey: A Final Summary
The journey from answering your first question to receiving your final score for university admissions involves several key steps. Here is a simple summary of the entire process:
- Step 1: You Answer the Questions
➡️- Step 2: Your Raw Score is Calculated
(+5 for correct, -1 for incorrect, 0 for unattempted) ➡️- Step 3: Your Performance is Compared to Others in Your Shift (Percentile)
➡️- Step 4: Your Final, Normalized NTA Score is Determined
(Using the Equi-percentile method for fairness across all shifts)
It is this final, Normalized NTA Score that universities use to create merit lists and determine admission cut-offs.
7.0 Conclusion: Key Strategies for a Better Score
Understanding how your CUET score is calculated empowers you to be a smarter test-taker. The two most important concepts to remember are the +5/-1 marking scheme, which emphasizes accuracy, and the normalization process, which ensures fairness.
To help you succeed, here is a final set of strategies based on what we’ve learned.
Strategies to Maximize Your Score
- Prioritize Accuracy Over Speed: The +5/-1 marking scheme heavily penalizes blind guessing. If you’re truly unsure, skipping a question is always safer than guessing incorrectly and losing a mark.
- Understand “Marked for Review”: Use this feature wisely as a personal reminder, but remember that only questions where you have selected an answer will be graded. An unanswered question marked for review is still just an unanswered question.
- Trust the Process: The normalization process is designed to create a level playing field. Concentrate on delivering your best possible performance on the test you are given, and have confidence that the system is built for fairness.