As the clock struck 10 on Thursday night, nervous excitement filled a paying guest (P-G) accommodation in Rajasthan’s Udaipur. Each occupant, including 18-year-old Ishaan Kasturi, was on the same internet page on their phone or laptop.
After all, the result for the eagerly awaited Common University Entrance Test (CUET) – for admission at the undergraduate level at central universities – was supposed to be announced.
The result, however, was delayed by over six hours. Students across the country, like Kasturi and his friends in Udaipur, spent the night anxiously refreshing the CUET result page, tracking updates from the National Testing Agency (NTA) on Twitter, and forwarding funny CUET memes.
“We were up till 5 am at least as there was no other option. We cracked jokes, and that helped us cope with the stress of endlessly waiting for the result,” said Kasturi.
The Quint caught up with students from across cities about the long night of wait for the CUET results that were finally announced after 4 am.
‘Gave CUET in July, the Wait Has Been Depressing’
Manasvi Pandya, an 18-year-old student from Udaipur, said that it’s been a “rollercoaster” for her batch, “from CBSE to CUET.”
She told The Quint, “We had to wait a lot to give the exam, then we waited for the result. I sat for the CUET in the first phase which was mid-July, so I have been waiting since. To wait for that long for your result is depressing because there is constant worry and pressure from the family about what our future holds.”
On 15 September, Pandya started checking the result at 10 pm and finally dozed off a little after 2 am. Before that, the site had crashed several times, said Pandya, and the message on the screen was, “Error 505 Not Found.”
She said, “Some websites were running that the result will be out by 2 am, so I waited but once even that didn’t happen, I slept. I woke up at 6.30 am and checked my phone and saw my result.”
This was not the end of Pandya’s anxiety, as the result was “10-20 percent less than what she had counted” using the answer key.
“The normalisation reduced the score,” she lamented.
On Thursday, M Jagadesh Kumar, the chairperson of the University Grants Commission (UGC), said that the CUET result will be announced at 10 pm. At 10.01 pm, the NTA tweeted, “We are working at the results of the CUET (UG) 2022. It may take some time.”
Twitter and Instagram were soon flooded with jokes, memes, and a ton of outrage by students who didn’t know how long it will take.
Pandya said, “When I opened Twitter to check what’s happening with the CUET result, I came across a tweet by NTA saying the results are delayed and the replies under the tweet were hilarious. One of the comments was, ‘Bhai ruk jao do saal bad dena itni bhi kya jaldi hai, aaram se’.”
'Father, Grandfather Stayed Up Waiting for my Result'
Manvendra Singh Thakur, an 18-year-old from Madhya Pradesh’s Indore, said that apart from him, his father and grandfather too were awake till late at night awaiting his CUET result.
“My grandfather kept asking every hour when the result will be out,” he said. For Kasturi, it was the company of friends at the P-G, also awaiting their result, which kept him going.
Preal Chauhan, an 18-year-old from Delhi, said that her parents were equally excited and anxious about the result.
Thakur said that he hit refresh button “at least 100-150 times” but the website kept crashing. Meanwhile, Kasturi said, “Sabko bata rakha tha ki result aana hai so everyone was up and anxious. We had all worked very hard and were eager to see the scorecard but the website kept crashing.”
Others like Vanshika Puri, kept “chatting with friends to feel better.” In the morning, however, when she finally saw the result, she was left confused. She told The Quint, “I couldn’t understand what I need to interpret from the result—the percentile or the normalised marks.”
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