How KEAM exam row throws the spotlight on skewed marks normalisation processes

The Hindu

17 hours ago

Another year, another entrance exam controversy. This time, the Kerala Engineering Architecture Medical (KEAM) examination is under fire. The admissions process is stalled, and thousands of students, after months of grueling preparation, have been thrown into a state of acute anxiety.
The reason? A sudden, last-minute change to the ranking rules, made after the exam was already over. For students who had meticulously calculated their potential ranks and admission chances based on the established system, this move shattered all predictability, throwing their future plans into chaos. This isn't an isolated incident; it's a symptom of a deep-seated rot in the admissions systems in our country, built on a foundation of opaque and statistically questionable formulas.
The KEAM fiasco began on July 1, 2025, when the Kerala government issued an order fundamentally amending the prospectus. This order completely altered how Class 12 board marks, which account for 50% of the final rank, are calculated. Changing the rules after the game is over is a cardinal sin, and it left students feeling betrayed and helpless.
The necessary evil of score adjustment
To be fair, in a country as diverse as India, some form of score adjustment is unavoidable. When an exam like JEE Main or CUET is conducted in multiple shifts, the difficulty level varies. Similarly, when board exam marks from over 30 different boards are given weightage, how does one fairly compare a 90% from CBSE with a 90% from a state board?
This is where statistical methods like standardization and normalization come in. Standardization, often using a Z-score, recalibrates marks from different groups onto a common scale by considering the mean and standard deviation of each group's full performance. Normalization methods aim to find a score-percentile equivalence across different sessions. While necessary, the application of these methods in India has been a tale of persistent problems.
The ghosts of JEE and CUET
The Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for engineering has been a battleground for normalization issues for years. After a failed attempt to incorporate board exam marks (an experiment abandoned due to the non-uniformity of boards), the National Testing Agency (NTA) settled on a percentile-based system.
The underlying assumption here is that the distribution of student ability is identical across all shifts. This is a statistical fantasy.
As a result, we see massive variations in raw scores required to achieve the same percentile. A student scoring 180 in a difficult shift might end up with a lower percentile than a student scoring 160 in an easier one. This creates a perception of a 'lottery' based on which shift a student is assigned, fueling anxiety and endless court cases.
The Common University Entrance Test (CUET), introduced to streamline university admissions, has its own set of normalization woes. It uses a complex 'equipercentile method' involving interpolation.
Students and experts have raised concerns about the 'bunching' of scores at the 100th percentile, where thousands of students get the same perfect normalized score, making it impossible for universities to differentiate between them. This has paralyzed admissions at premier institutions like the University of Delhi.
Unable to differentiate between top candidates, colleges are forced to revert to arbitrary tie-breakers like board marks or even age, defeating the very purpose of a common test designed to ensure merit-based, equitable admissions. The process remains largely a black box for the average student, breeding mistrust.
The trouble with KEAM's new Math
The KEAM situation is a case study in flawed statistical application, featuring two contentious layers of adjustment. Firstly, the normalization applied across different shifts of the KEAM entrance exam is itself problematic. With an audience roughly 1/20th the size of JEE's, applying a normalization method that assumes a vast, evenly distributed pool of candidates is statistically unsound. This isn't just a theory; students from the April 29th shift have already complained of being put at a significant disadvantage.
Secondly, and more egregiously, is the government's post-exam overhaul of how board marks are calculated. For years, Kerala used a standardization formula based on a Z-score. However, this method recently began to disadvantage Kerala State board students due to massive grade inflation.
With liberal valuation leading to a glut of students scoring very high marks, the State board's score distribution became highly skewed. So the actual problem was not with the mathematical formula - but with the system itself, but instead of correcting the system the Commissioner of Entrance Examinations chose to abandon standardization altogether.
This year, Kerala has abandoned standardization in its true sense. The previous system, a form of Z-score standardization, considered the performance distribution of all students from a particular board. The new method, however, is being called normalization, but it is a deeply flawed way to compare students.
Instead of looking at the overall distribution, the new system simply pegs the highest score in a subject from any board to the highest score achieved in the Kerala State Board. In simple terms, if the top score in Physics from one board is 95, and the top score in the Kerala board is 100, the system treats 95 as the new 100 for every student from that board. All other scores are then scaled up based on this single data point.
This makes the entire rank list beholden to the performance of a handful of toppers, who could be statistical outliers. It is not a genuine comparison of student performance across boards. Apparently, this year the toppers from the CBSE as well as the State board have scored 100% in PCM subjects making the normalization procedure null and void for the year.
To add insult to injury, the amendment also changed the subject weightage for calculating the board exam component to a 5:3:2 ratio for Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry, respectively. This is unfair, as students appeared for their board exams without any knowledge that their performance in Mathematics would suddenly carry almost as much weight as Physics and Chemistry combined.
The path forward: From opacity to trust
The judiciary will have its say on the KEAM matter. But we cannot keep running to the courts for every exam. This cycle of flawed systems, student protests, and last-minute fixes needs to end. We need a fundamental rethink.
Embrace transparency: Methodologies and their rationale must be made public in an understandable format, well before the examination process begins.
Abandon the Board mark charade: The JEE experiment has proved that incorporating Board marks is problematic. Until we can achieve uniformity in evaluation across the nation's school Boards, giving them weightage in rankings is an exercise in futility.
Democratize test preparation: The government should invest in creating high-quality, free, and accessible preparatory resources to level the playing field for students from all economic backgrounds.
Constitute permanent, independent expert bodies: The formulation of admission policies should not be a reactive, panic-driven exercise. We need permanent, independent committees of statisticians, psychometricians, and academicians to devise and continually review these procedures.
The root cause
Our current approach to admissions is not just a technical failure; it is a moral one. Finally, we must remember that these examination bodies are not just administrative agencies; they are multi-crore entities that earn significant revenue from the application fees paid by lakhs of students. This financial relationship creates a profound moral responsibility.
It is imperative that our system evolves to become truly student-centric and friendly, treating applicants not as data points in a flawed formula, but as the primary stakeholders they are, investing both their money and their futures in a system that must be worthy of their trust.
Our current approach to admission is turning a period of hope and ambition into one of anxiety and injustice for millions of our brightest young minds. They deserve better. They deserve a system that is fair, transparent, and, above all, predictable.
(The author is an IIT Madras graduate, an engineer-turned-educator. He engages with students through 'unlearn with ajmal' youtube channel)