What is CUET?
If you’re in class 11 or 12 and keep hearing the word without knowing what it means, this is the short version.
One exam, many universities
CUET-UG is a single national entrance exam conducted by the NTA. Central universities — Delhi University, BHU, JNU, Jamia Millia Islamia and others — use your CUET score instead of your class 12 marks to decide undergraduate admission. You sit it once, in around May, after class 12.
It replaced the old system where each university set its own cutoff on board marks. One exam now, rather than a dozen applications on twelve different criteria.
What’s actually in the exam
CUET isn’t one paper. You choose up to five papers from three sections: languages, domain subjects, and a general test. At least one has to be a language.
Each paper is 50 questions. A correct answer is +5 and a wrong one is −1, so guessing costs you.
Your papers decide what you can apply for
This is the part students get wrong, and it’s expensive. Every course requires specific CUET papers. B.Com. (Hons.) at DU needs either Mathematics or Accountancy. Economics (Hons.) needs Mathematics. If you didn’t study the subject in class 12, you can’t take that paper — and the course closes to you before you’ve even sat the exam.
Which means your class 11 subject choice quietly decides your degree options two years later.
What a cutoff means
A cutoff isn’t a pass mark decided in advance. It’s whatever the last student to get a seat happened to score. If a college has 62 seats for a course, students are allocated from the highest score downwards until the seats run out — and the 62nd student’s score becomes “the cutoff”.
That’s why cutoffs change every year, differ between colleges for the same course, and drop in later rounds as students leave and seats reopen. Every category — general, OBC-NCL, SC, ST, EWS and others — has its own.
After your result, the exam is only half of it
A CUET score doesn’t apply you anywhere. Each university runs its own registration on its own portal with its own deadline. DU’s CSAS opened in late June this year; BHU closed on 27 July; JNU closed on 22 July. A student watching only DU would have lost both.
Universities also treat the score differently — DU builds a merit score from your papers; BHU computes a programme-specific merit score from the normalised CUET score; AMU publishes ranked selection lists with no marks on them at all. So a BHU number and a DU number aren’t comparable.