Updated on: Wednesday, April 10, 2013
The meeting of the Council of National Institutes of Technology (NIT) failed to evolve a method to normalize class XII exam results of various secondary education boards.
Normalization method has to be finalized before the class XII exam results are declared. It has been necessitated as NITs and host of other central government-funded technical institutions have agreed to follow the new admission system in which 40 per cent weightage would be given to board exam results. But due to marked variations in the results of state boards normalization is needed.
The committee, comprising NIT directors, CBSE chairperson Vineet Joshi, Indian Statistical Institute faculty, and a member from IIT-Kanpur discussed four options on Tuesday. A source said, "Consensus could not be reached as there were some new members who had to be apprised of all options. Another meeting is slated next week."
Though there are four options, the committee has zeroed on two of them. One by transforming percentile score of all boards (based on aggregates of subject marks) identically in such a way that the set of transformed scores of the students of each board have the same distribution as the JEE-Main all India aggregate marks. Two by transforming percentile scores of each board (based on aggregates of subject marks) so that transformed scores of the students of each board have the same distribution as the JEE-Main aggregate marks of candidates appearing from that board.
Since last year, four options have been discussed. The first option is to increase the percentile of eligible students proportionately across the boards. Second is to equate the mean marks of the school boards. Third is to equate mean marks as well as the standard deviation. As fourth option RASCH model is being considered. Generally, RASCH is employed for analysing data from assessments to measure variables such as abilities, attitudes, and personality traits. This model factors in the difference in difficulty levels of subjects across the boards. This model is considered to be more sophisticated and will help address the apprehension about students from boards with easier syllabus having an edge over others.
The committee is testing data of 2011-12 results from eight boards on various options before deciding on the most suitable one.