NTA introduces percentile system for JEE Main 2019 results

JEE Main 2019 information brochure was released on September 1 on the official website of the exam. With NTA overtaking CBSE as the conducting authority of the year from 2019, the exam has witnessed few changes as well.

According to the official website, JEE Main 2019 merit list will be based on percentile scores and not on raw marks secured by aspirants in the exam.

JEE Main is a gateway for admissions to NITs (National Institutes of Technology), IIITs (Indian Institutes of Information Technology) and some CFTIs (Centrally Funded Technical Institutes). The exam is also the first step towards admissions to the premier IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology). JEE Main is the qualifying examination for JEE Advanced.

JEE Main 2019 will be held twice from next year - in January and in April. With the format of the exam being tweaked, JEE Main Paper 1 will now be conducted completely online. With this, the NTA also announced a new process for calculation of JEE Main score by NTA. This score will be the basis of creation of final merit list for admissions to IITs.

According to an HRD official, the normalisation process based on the percentile score to calculate NTA score will follow the procedure used by AIIMS to calculate scores for its MBBS exam.

The official also shared, " A core group of experts from IIT Roorkee, IIT Kanpur, IIT Delhi, IIT Guwahati, IIM Lucknow, NITs, UGC, IASRI (Pusa) and AIIMS, Delhi, amongst others have been asked to finalise the process for calculating the NTA score".

Predict your JEE Main Rank by using our JEE Main 2019 Percentile Predictor.

Here's how the new percentile procedure of ranking in JEE Main will work:

1. JEE Main 2019 exam will be held in different sessions. Each session will have its own NTA percentile score with the highest scorer (s) as 100 percentile.
2. A master NTA score will be prepared where all the sessions will be put together for a final ranking.
3. The candidate on the top in the final ranking will be the 100 percentile.
4. In case of a tie between 100 percentile scorers or any other percentile rank, the merit will be decided on the basis of the highest percentile in Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry in that order.
5. If there is a further tie, the person older in age will be ranked higher. The same method will be applied for JEE Main 2019 Paper 2 exam for BArch admissions as well.
6. NTA will announce a final merit list after JEE Main Paper 2 exam.
7. For aspirants who appear for both the exams (January and April), the better percentile will be counted in the merit list.

Note: To avoid a bunching effect and reduce tied scores, the percentile scores will be calcuated up to seven decimals.

Under the new exam format introduced by NTA, the exam will be held over a period of 14 days in each cycle with multiple sessions each day. The idea is to reduce the chances of cheating and malpractices.

Reportedly, the difficulty level of question papers in different sessions may not exactly be same. An NTA official was quoted as saying, “Candidates will get different sets of questions per session and though efforts will be made to maintain equivalence amongst various question papers", reported a national daily.

However, the percentile score of each session will be based on the relative performance of students in that particular shift. So the percentile scores of each session will be considered at par.

This means that some students may have to attempt a relatively tougher set of questions as compared to other students. This will lead them towards securing lower marks. But in order to level the results, the normalisation procedure based on percentile score will be used so that students are neither benefitted or disadvantaged due to the difficulty level of JEE Main.

The entire process of normalization is basically divided into three steps:

1. Distribution of examinees in the sessions randomly. This will ensure each session gets approximately equal number of aspirants.
2. Preparation of JEE Main results for each session and compilation of NTA score.
3. Preparation of overall merit/rank list.