No candidate’s marks normalised: NTA on row over CUET-PG-2026

Amid the queries about the evaluation process of the Common University Entrance Test Postgraduate (CUET PG)-2026 on social media, the National Testing Agency (NTA) has clarified that the marks of any candidate appearing for the rescheduled examination had not been normalised.In March 2026, due to the law-and-order disruption at Tura in Meghalaya and the security situation at certain overseas centres, 565 candidates across 28 subjects could not appear on their originally scheduled dates, for reasons entirely beyond their control.

The NTA said that it had rescheduled the examination for these 565 candidates only on March 29 and 30 as a welfare measure.

“For CUET (PG), the NTA’s policy is to report absolute marks for every candidate in every subject. No candidate’s score is normalised — neither in the main examination nor in the reschedule exam. There was, therefore, nothing the rescheduled candidates were exempted from; they were scored on exactly the same basis as everyone else,” the agency clarified, adding that normalisation across these two groups would in any case be statistically meaningless given the scale involved.

“For instance, roughly 16,000 candidates appeared in English during the main examination against about 120 in the reschedule exam; in political science the figures were about 26,000 against roughly 100; in history it was about 13,600 against under 80. A cohort of a hundred cannot be statistically normalised against tens of thousands,” the NTA said.

The rescheduled exams had used approved question papers that were finalised earlier by subject experts, who certified that they were of difficulty equivalent to the papers used in the main examination for the same subjects.

“In short, every CUET (PG) 2026 candidate’s score is computed on an identical, absolute-marks basis. The reschedule changed nothing about how scores were arrived at,” it asserted.