The National Testing Agency (NTA) has issued an official clarification addressing a growing wave of queries and concerns on social media regarding the CUET PG 2026 rescheduled examination. The agency has firmly stated that scores of candidates who appeared in the rescheduled exams were neither normalised nor inflated, and that no candidate gained any unfair advantage over others. The clarification, published on NTA’s official X (formerly Twitter) handle on June 13, 2026, comes weeks after the CUET PG 2026 result was declared on April 24.
Why Was the Exam Rescheduled?
The controversy traces back to March 2026, when CUET PG 2026 examinations were disrupted for a small group of candidates due to two distinct external circumstances entirely beyond their control.
First, a law-and-order disruption in Tura, Meghalaya, forced the cancellation of exams at the affected centre. Second, security-related concerns at certain overseas examination centres made it impossible for international candidates to appear as scheduled. Together, these events affected 565 candidates spread across 28 subjects, who were therefore unable to sit for their originally scheduled CUET PG 2026 papers.
Acting in line with its policy that no student should be penalised for circumstances not of their making, the NTA organised a special rescheduled examination exclusively for these 565 candidates on March 29 and 30, 2026.
The Social Media Controversy
Following the declaration of the CUET PG 2026 result, queries began surfacing online questioning the fairness of the evaluation process. Certain social media posts alleged “irregularities and discrepancies” in NTA’s handling of the rescheduled exam, with some users demanding that the scores of students who appeared on March 29 and 30 be made public in the interest of transparency. The posts suggested that candidates in the rescheduled session may have received preferential treatment through score normalisation — a concern that NTA has now categorically denied.
NTA’s Official Clarification: No Normalisation Applied
In its detailed post on X, the NTA explained the basis on which CUET PG 2026 scores were calculated, leaving no ambiguity about the evaluation methodology:
Absolute Marks Policy: The NTA reiterated that its policy for CUET PG has always been to report absolute marks — that is, the actual raw marks scored by a candidate — across all subjects, for all candidates. This policy applied uniformly to the main examination held in March 2026 as well as the rescheduled exam. There was no normalisation of scores for any candidate in any session.
Statistical Impossibility Argument: NTA also addressed why normalisation could not have been applied even hypothetically. The agency highlighted the enormous disparity in the number of candidates between the main exam and the rescheduled session. For example, nearly 16,000 candidates appeared for the English paper in the main examination compared to just around 120 in the rescheduled session. In Political Science, approximately 26,000 candidates sat for the main paper versus roughly 100 in the reschedule. In History, the figures were around 13,600 in the main exam against under 80 in the rescheduled sitting.
As NTA explained, statistically normalising a cohort of around a hundred candidates against tens of thousands is neither scientifically valid nor meaningful. No normalisation was therefore applied — and no candidate gained any advantage as a result.
Equivalent Question Papers: Addressing concerns about the fairness of the question papers used for the rescheduled session, the NTA clarified that the papers were prepared and approved in advance by subject experts, who certified them to be of equivalent difficulty to the papers used in the main examination for the same subjects. The rescheduled candidates answered papers that were no easier or harder than those attempted by their peers during the main exam window.
Uniform Evaluation for All
The NTA concluded its statement by affirming that every CUET PG 2026 candidate’s score was calculated on the same absolute-marks basis, and that the rescheduled examinations did not alter the scoring process in any way. The agency emphasised that the rescheduled exam was purely a welfare measure to ensure that students who could not appear due to extraordinary external circumstances were not left at a disadvantage — not a mechanism to benefit any particular group.
Candidates are encouraged to visit the official CUET PG portal at exams.nta.nic.in/cuet-pg for any further queries regarding their results or the evaluation process.
What This Means for Candidates
The NTA’s clarification is significant for all CUET PG 2026 aspirants awaiting admission to postgraduate programmes across the approximately 203 universities that accept CUET PG scores. The transparency exercised by the agency in publicly addressing social media concerns reflects its commitment to maintaining the credibility of the examination process. Qualified candidates may now proceed with the subsequent counselling and admission processes offered by respective participating universities, confident that all scores reflect uniform, absolute assessment standards.
