board, was adopted to bring all the candidates onto an even platform so as to finalize the list of candidates eligible to be interviewed. This was done by applying a formula uniformly to the marks secured by all the candidates who appeared in the two main examinations, so that their marks would become comparable and enable preparation of a unified marks list. 27. Significantly, in State of U.P. and others vs. Atul Kumar Dwivedi and others1, this Court had occasion to consider application of moderation/scaling of marks in a recruitment process and as to when such 1 (2022) 11 SCC 578 17an exercise would be permissible. It was observed that normalization of marks means increasing and/or decreasing the marks obtained by students in different timing sessions (shifts) to a certain number, as observed by the High Court in its judgment, and it was noted that such normalization techniques help in comparing corresponding normalized values from two or more different data sets in a way that it