Hi! I hope the latest update on MBA CET 2021 admission process has reached you and you have started filling the CAP (Centralized Application Process) form.

In the past, the CET cell has always released the absolute score and percentile of all the candidates in a PDF which they have not done this year. Till CET 2020, the difficulty of CET across four slots used to be more or less similar. In such cases, normalization or no normalization doesn’t impact too much. But when the difficulty levels of the individual slots are significantly different, normalization becomes extremely important.

This year, as most of you are aware, there were several issues:

1. To begin with, there was no sectional split and all the 200 questions were presented in jumbled manner in a single section – deviation from what was initially informed.
2. Different slots had different number of questions in each of the sections with some students reporting close to 80-90 QA questions in one slot and some reporting very few abstract reasoning questions in another slot.
3. The slots had different difficulty as well – Day 3 slot 1 was considered to be the easiest whereas slot with advanced math questions was considered to be the most difficult.
4. The results were temporarily visible through a link and reported only the percentiles. They later informed everyone that it was a technical issue and the final scores would be released later.
5. The final scorecard contained only the percentile and not the score of the candidate.

Today, CET cell announced the Centralized Admission Process. Once you start filling the form, in the second step, you will be able to see your CET score. I gathered some initial data (and you can help me in this research by submitting the data through this form) and the result was surprising. Two people, same score, two different slots. That’s possible only if they have NOT normalized and just put all the raw scores together and calculated the percentile.

I know this is a small sample but you can clearly notice the issue:

How is Day 1 slot 1, Day 1 slot 2, and Day 3 slot 1 even comparable? Especially when people have come back and reported huge differences in the number of questions in individual sections and overall difficulty. Another data point which raises a question on the percentile calculation process is how similar the score vs percentile data is if you compare the 2020 and 2021 result. A 105 raw score in the year 2021 and the year 2020 is 97.18 and 97.07 percentile respectively. Are you telling me that the score distribution in these two years is as close as it can get? Where is the number of candidates across slots data? Where is the number of candidates at a certain score data? Where is the total number of takers data?

There are so many unanswered questions with this result and it reminds me of some of the poorly conducted tests – SNAP 2020, CMAT 2021, CET 2015, etc. After SNAP result last year which had a similar problem (different difficulty levels, no normalization), I had written a post on the blog after capturing score vs percentile data. An excerpt from that post:

This was not the result that you deserved. However, don’t waste your time fighting over it. There is a chance that nothing will change (Not taking a pessimistic stand here but I’ve seen more test seasons than most of you and know how these things unfold).

I will update the table after receiving more responses. Please update your data here: CET 2021 Scores

Wish you guys all the best for the CAP rounds. Do comment with your thoughts, share with friends, and don’t forget to subscribe 🙂