The National Testing Agency (NTA) has issued a clarification after questions were raised on social media about some CUET PG 2026 subjects being conducted on more than one date and the absence of score normalisation.
The agency said the confusion relates to a small group of candidates whose examinations had to be rescheduled due to circumstances beyond their control.
According to NTA, 565 candidates across 28 subjects could not appear for their examinations on the originally scheduled dates in March 2026 because of law-and-order disruptions in Tura, Meghalaya, and security concerns at certain overseas examination centres.
To ensure that these candidates were not disadvantaged, the agency conducted a special rescheduled examination on March 29 and 30, 2026.
NTA said the decision was taken as a welfare measure and did not change the way scores were calculated.
No Normalisation for Any Candidate
The agency clarified that CUET PG follows a system of reporting absolute marks for all candidates.
“For CUET (PG), NTA’s policy is to report absolute marks for every candidate, in every subject. No candidate's score is normalized — not in the main examination, not in the reschedule,” the agency said.
It added that the rescheduled candidates were assessed in exactly the same way as those who appeared in the main examination.
Why Normalisation Was Not Applied
NTA said normalisation between the two groups would not have been statistically meaningful because of the large difference in the number of candidates.
The agency pointed out that around 16,000 candidates appeared for the English paper in the main examination, compared to about 120 in the rescheduled test. In Political Science, around 26,000 candidates took the main examination while only about 100 appeared in the reschedule. For History, the numbers were around 13,600 and fewer than 80 respectively.
“A cohort of a hundred cannot be statistically normalized against tens of thousands,” NTA said.
Question Papers of Equivalent Difficulty
The agency also stated that the rescheduled examinations used question papers that had already been prepared and approved by subject experts.
According to NTA, the experts certified that the papers were of equivalent difficulty to those 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,” the agency said.
