JEE Main merit list to be based on percentile scores

The JEE Main merit list, will be based on percentile scores and not raw marks.

The JEE main merit list, which will decide the basis for admission to NITs and other CFTIs, will have a new procedure for arriving at the final score, as per the National Testing Agency (NTA).This comes after NTA’s decision to conduct JEE Main in two cycles of computer based examination.

Candidates will get different sets of question papers per session and efforts will be made by NTA to maintain equivalence among various question papers. The difficulty level of question papers in different sessions won’t be the same. Hence normalization will be used by the NTA to calculate the final score. Thereby ensuring a level playing field.

“A core group of experts from IITs(Roorkee, Kanpur, Delhi, Guwahati), IIM-Lucknow, NITs, UGC, IASRI (Pusa) and AIIMS, Delhi, among others have been asked to finalize the process for calculating the NTA score,” said an NTA official.

The apex agency feels the changes in the system are necessary because of the changing test format from next year onwards. From 2019 onwards, JEE main will be conducted twice, and the candidate’s best score will be considered.

• The procedure for calculating the final score will be carried out in the following steps :
• Each session will have it’s own NTA score with the highest scorer(s) as 100 percentile.
• A master NTA score will be prepared where all the sessions will be put together for a final ranking
• The top ranked candidate in the final ranking will be the 100 percentile
• The tie breaker between the 100 percentile scorers will be the highest percentile in Mathematics, Physics & Chemistry in that order
• If the scores are tied even after this, the older person will be ranked higher.
• The same method will be applied to the Main 2 exam
• A final merit list will be announced after Main 2
• For those who take both cycles of the exam, the better percentile will count in the final merit list.