Every result season the same question goes round the group chats: is it worth paying for revaluation, or is it money thrown away? The answers are always somebody's cousin's story. So we stopped guessing and counted.
The University of Mumbai publishes two gazettes for the same exam. First the original result. Then, some weeks later, a revaluation gazette covering the students who applied for a recheck. Both are public PDFs on mumresults.in. Nobody appears to have ever put the two side by side at scale.
We matched 180 of those pairs and compared the same seat number before and after. That comes to 17,446 student records across four exam sessions of first year engineering, covering both the NEP 2020 scheme and the older C-Scheme.
What revaluation actually did
| Measure | Result |
|---|---|
| Went in marked unsuccessful | 14,658 |
| Came out successful | 4,037 (27.5%) |
| Had already passed, then failed on recheck | 0 |
| Cleared at least one more subject | 9,487 |
| No change in subjects cleared | 7,891 |
| Ended with more subjects failed | 3 |
More than one in four students who went into revaluation carrying a fail came out of it passing. That is the number worth knowing.
The second number is just as useful: marks move in one direction almost without exception. Of the records where the same set of papers could be compared on both sides, 8,504 gained marks, 193 stayed exactly the same, and 17 lost marks. The median gain was 9 marks. The average was 12.4.
Not one student who had already passed was pushed back into a fail. Three students out of 17,446 finished with more subjects outstanding than they started with. The risk is not literally zero, but it is close enough that fear of losing marks should not be the thing that stops you applying.
The subject that decides your year
Among students who applied for revaluation, this is the share still carrying a fail in each paper after the recheck. It is a good map of where first year engineering actually breaks.
| Paper | Scheme | Still failing after recheck |
|---|---|---|
| Engineering Mechanics | NEP | 68.0% |
| Basic Electrical and Electronics Engineering | NEP | 51.6% |
| Applied Mathematics I | NEP | 46.3% |
| Applied Mathematics II | NEP | 45.5% |
| Engineering Mechanics | C-Scheme | 39.6% |
| Engineering Mathematics I | C-Scheme | 34.9% |
| Engineering Mathematics II | C-Scheme | 32.4% |
| Engineering Physics II | C-Scheme | 29.3% |
| Basic Electrical Engineering | C-Scheme | 27.3% |
| Engineering Physics I | C-Scheme | 23.6% |
Engineering Mechanics is the wall, in both schemes, by a distance. If you are planning a year, plan it around that paper.
The mirror image is worth saying out loud: term work and lab heads are not where students lose the year. Engineering Chemistry term work, Basic Workshop Practice, Engineering Physics term work and Professional Communication term work all sit at or near a 0% fail rate across thousands of records. The marks that decide your result are in the theory papers.
Not every course gains equally
Across the 31 courses where we could compare at least 150 students, the share of failing students who flipped to a pass ran from 5.7% at the low end to 37.6% at the high end, with a median of 22.5%. Computer Engineering and Information Technology under the C-Scheme sat at the top. Civil and Chemical Engineering under NEP sat at the bottom.
Splitting by scheme, 29.8% of C-Scheme failures flipped, against 26.2% under NEP 2020.
So should you apply?
What the data supports:
- If you are carrying one or two failed heads, the odds are genuinely in your favour. That group is where most of the 4,037 flips came from.
- Your marks will almost certainly go up or stay flat. Losing marks is rare enough to be a rounding error.
- A pass you already hold is not at risk.
What the data does not support:
- Treating 27.5% as your personal chance. Only students who chose to apply appear in these gazettes, and students who apply are usually the ones sitting close to the line. A student 20 marks short is not the same case as a student 2 marks short.
- Assuming this holds outside first year engineering. Those are the courses where MU published matched revaluation gazettes we could verify. We have not measured other faculties.
For the current fee, deadline and application process, use the revaluation weblist for your session on the official results portal. Those details change session to session and the University's own circular is the only safe source.
How we did this
We downloaded the official gazette PDFs from mumresults.in, converted each to text, and read out every student record. A revaluation gazette was matched to its original only when the two carried the same course, the same semester, the same exam session, and an overlapping set of seat numbers. Where MU issued more than one revaluation file for a single exam, we kept only the latest so that no student was counted twice.
Totals and credit points were compared only where both gazettes listed the same set of papers, because some revaluation gazettes reprint only the papers that were rechecked, which makes the totals look smaller for reasons that have nothing to do with the student.
We report aggregates only. No student name, seat number, or individual result appears in this article, and we do not republish the gazette PDFs. Every figure here can be rebuilt from the University's own public files.
munotes is an independent study resource for MU students and is not affiliated with the University of Mumbai. If you spot an error in these numbers, please report it and we will correct the article with a dated note.