JEE Main 2024: NTA Issues Clarification Over Discrepancy In JEE Main Results

The National Testing Agency (NTA) has released a notification clarifying various issues that were raised by students after the declaration of the results of the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) Main Session 1. The clarification is issued as many candidates took to social media to express their concerns over the alleged discrepancies in the results.

Reiterating that the JEE (Main) – 2024 Session 1 examination 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.

The official notification by NTA 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."

What is the Normalisation procedure?

As per the policy, the NTA does not release the raw scores, it only releases the percentile. The percentile score is the normalized score for the examination and is used for the preparation of the merit lists. Normalization procedure is an internationally accepted system designed for direct comparison by transforming the marks onto a common scale and is available in the information bulletin of JEE (Main) – 2024.

As per the NTA, the normalisation procedure ensured the distribution of candidates to make it of a homogenous nature based on the report of the committee of experts consisting of reputed professors of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), and the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) in November 2018 and reviewed in October 2020.
NTA conducted JEE (Main) – 2024 Session 1 (January 2024) in about 544 centres across 291 cities (including 21 cities outside India). The session was conducted in 10 shifts which is two shifts less than the previous year despite the number of registered candidates going up with an increase of 27%.