The National Testing Agency (NTA), which is in charge of conducting the JEE Mains examination, has finally issued a clarification regarding the rumors that are running rampant on social media. Online rumors are currently spreading that 24% of the 12 lakh applicants who applied in a single shift were tested by NTA. A number of candidates following claims of irregular candidate allocation within shifts and mistakes in percentile computation made by a number of students who took the exam between January 24 and February 1.
However, NTA has disregarded these claims as untrue. Statements implying that the test was administered to 65% of applicants during four shifts during the first two days of the JEE exam are untrue, according to NTA authorities.
NTA's clarification
According to NTA, the procedure guarantees that each candidate who appears during a shift receives the same question paper with mixed-up questions and options. They are being put to the test fairly in this sense. In such a situation, it is standard procedure for a candidate with a higher score to be rated higher than any other candidate with a lower score.
"JEE (Main) – 2024 Session 1 examination has been conducted as per norms and procedures followed for conduct of any high-stakes examination thereby providing fair and equal opportunity for all candidates," the NTA stated, citing the use of a normalization procedure based on percentile score to ensure that candidates were neither disadvantaged nor benefited due to the examination's difficulty level.
Normalization process
According to the NTA, the normalization process guaranteed a homogeneous candidate distribution based on the report of the expert committee, which was composed of renowned professors from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), and Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in November 2018 and reviewed in October 2020.
JEE (Main) - 2024 Session 1 was held by NTA in about 544 centers spread across 291 cities (including 21 places outside India) in January 2024. Despite a 27% rise in the number of registered candidates, the session was held over 10 shifts, two less than the previous year.
"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 each question paper's difficulty level," stated the official NTA notification. Since the different levels of difficulty in the question papers are an intrinsic feature of the multi-shift examination, the preferred method for determining scores is normalization. The raw scores and the normalized scores are not equal. The 'Normalization process based on Percentile Score' was employed to guarantee that applicants did not experience any advantage or disadvantage as a result of the exam's difficulty level."
