CUET-UG Leans Offline Exam for 13 Red-Hot Subjects with 1,00,000+ Applicants

In CUET 2024, conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA), the examination of 13 subjects will be held in pen-paper mode for the first time. NTA has started preparations for this. National Testing Agency (NTA) on the instructions of UGC will conduct the examination of 13 subjects in Combined University Entrance Examination-Undergraduate (CUET-UG)-2024 in offline mode with more than one lakh applications. These 13 subjects include Economics/Business Economics, Accountancy/Book Keeping, Biology, Biotechnology, Business Studies, Chemistry, Computer Science, English, General Test, Hindi, History, Mathematics, Physics and Political Science. Whereas the examination of subjects with less than one lakh applications will be taken online.

A total of 13 lakh 47 thousand students have registered for CUET UG 2024. NTA has received a total of 13,47,618 unique successful registrations in 62 subjects in CUET UG 2024. Of these, 7 lakh 17 thousand 11 are boys and 6 lakh 30 thousand 500 are girls. Apart from this, there are also seven transgenders. A total of 57 lakh 69 thousand 211 students had filled the online application.

The exam, which is conducted by the National Testing Agency, will be administered in hybrid mode for the first time between May 16 to 31.

The testing body in February announced that for subjects with a high number of applicants or more than one hundred thousand registrations, the exam will be conducted in pen and paper mode using the Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) format. For other subjects, it will continue to be computer-based.

More than 1.35 million candidates have registered for the CUET-UG this year, official data showed.

Of them, 717,000 are male, and 630,000 are female, and seven have registered as the third gender. Each candidate can register for up to six subjects. As many as 261 universities are participating in the test this year.

English has seen the highest registration with over a ,million candidates, followed by general test (830,000), chemistry (700,000), physics (680,000), mathematics (490,000), biology (390,000), economics (214,000), Hindi (200,000), business studies (190,000), accountancy (180,000), political science (161,000) and history (137,000).

UGC chairperson M Jagadesh Kumar, who is overseeing the conduct of the examination, said the data is being analysed. “But generally, papers with large registrations such as general test, English, Hindi, physics, chemistry, maths, biology, economics and such similar papers are expected to be in OMR mode,” Kumar said.

“But the final list of papers, which will be conducted in OMR mode, will be announced by NTA at an appropriate time.”

This year the testing agency will use schools, colleges and other educational institutions as exam centres, Kumar said, unlike earlier when only centres equipped with a large number of computers were used. “It will help NTA to allot centres to students near their houses,” he said.

Of the 1.35 million students registered this year, 5.5 million are from the general category, 482,000 from other backward classes, 144,000 from scheduled castes, 88,083 from scheduled tribes and 88,311 from economically weaker sections of society, according to official data.

Top 10 domain subjects

General test 8,34,207

Chemistry 7,01,750

Physics 6,72,773

Maths/ Applied mathematics 4,86,365

Biology/Biological studies/Biotecnology/ Biochemistry 3,91,409

Economics/ Business economics 2,13,996

Business studies 1,93,252

Accountancy/ Book-keeping 1,80,795

Political science 1,61,333

History 1,37,568

Top 5 language subjects

English 10,07,336

Hindi 2,07,839

Sanskrit 8,901

Bengali 9,065

Urdu 6,726