The cut-off scores of previous years are given below. Cut-off for UGC NET in Commerce are given in ‘percentile’ for 2024, 2022, 2021 and 2020 exams, while it is given in ‘percentage’ for 2018, 2019 and then Dec 2023 exams. For commerce subject, for some exams, the NTA did not disclose the cut off in ‘percentage’ terms, but in ‘percentile’ terms. This is so because more than 1 lakh students write UGC NET in Commerce subject. Because the number of candidates in this subject is so high, the NTA is forced to conduct the exam in multiple shifts. The candidates are given different sets of question papers in each shift. It is likely that the difficulty level of these question papers in different shifts may not be exactly the same. Some of the candidates will end up attempting a relatively tougher set of questions in comparison to other candidates. To overcome this situation, the NTA has started a “Normalization procedure based on Percentile Score”. For example, a student may be scoring 78 percentage in a tougher paper in Shift 1, while another student may be scoring 78 percentage in an easier paper in Shift 2. Although both students scored the same percentage, the NTA awards 99.6 percentile to Shift 1 student and 99.4 percentile to Shift 2 student (these numbers are for illustration). This is based on the process of normalization.

So, what do we learn from Cut-Off analysis of UGC NET in Commerce?

The percentile does not give any estimate about cut-off score. If you are in a Shift with easier paper, your cut- off will be high. On the other hand, if you are in a shift with a tougher paper, your cut-off will be low. How much it will be low/high, can not be predicted. The students should try to target around 70 correct answers in Paper 2 and around 38-40 correct answers in Paper 1. The overall cut-off is likely to be “65 plus minus 5” for UGC NET in Commerce. So, we are advising to target score of 70/100 in paper 2 and 38/50 in Paper 1. Check out, why and how you should be targeting around 40 correct in Paper 1 out of 50 questions.