Methodology, sources and disclaimer
Where the cut-off marks come from
Every cut-off on this site comes from the UGC's official list "University Admission – Academic Year 2025/26: Minimum Z scores for selection to various courses of study of universities, in respect of each district", based on the results of the G.C.E. (Advanced Level) Examination 2025 after re-scrutiny. The document is dated 31/07/2026 and was released on 01/08/2026.
The earlier years (2024/25, 2023/24, 2022/23, 2021/22, 2018/19) come from the UGC's official cut-off lists for those years, each read and checked the same way.
The UGC University Admissions Handbook 2025/26 is used only for the explanations on this site (selection policy, all-island merit courses, aptitude tests). It supplies no cut-off numbers.
UGC University Admissions Handbook 2025/26 (PDF on ugc.ac.lk)
What is in the data
6 academic years: 2025/26, 2024/25, 2023/24, 2022/23, 2021/22, 2018/19. For 2025/26 there are 260 course and university combinations, each with a value for all 25 districts (6,500 cells: 5,474 cut-off marks and 1,026 NQC). Across all years there are 31,819 cut-off marks and 6,331 NQC cells.
Values are kept exactly as printed, to four decimal places. Course and university names are stored exactly as the UGC prints them; on screen they are shown in Title Case for easier reading. District names follow the UGC's spelling. Each year keeps the names printed in that year's list, so a course whose printed name changed between years appears separately in the trend tables.
How the data was checked
For every year, the values were read from the official PDF file by two independent PDF engines that had to agree on every row, checked for structure (25 district rows per page, one value per course column, four decimal places), traced back to their page and column, and then compared cell by cell with the PDF file by a third reading: every cell matches, 31,819 values and 6,331 NQC across 6 years.
How your Z-score is compared
Your Z-score is compared with the cut-off for your district for every course in the selected year. Safe means your Z-score is 0.05 or more above the cut-off; Borderline means within 0.05 of it; Missed means more than 0.05 below it. Within each group, courses are listed with the highest cut-off first. Courses with NQC for your district are listed separately, because there is no number to compare with.
The comparison runs in your browser. Your Z-score is not sent to or stored on any server.
How selection works
Under the 2025/26 admission policy (UGC handbook, Section 1.1), up to 40% of the places in a course are filled in order of Z-score on an all-island merit basis, 55% are allocated to the 25 administrative districts in proportion to population, and 5% go to students from 16 educationally disadvantaged districts. The UGC list gives one minimum Z-score per district; it does not say which of these quotas that minimum relates to.
Courses marked * in the UGC list are selected 100% on all-island merit, so the same cut-off is printed for every district. Courses marked # also require a practical/aptitude test conducted by the university (handbook page 151).
What is not included
2019/20 and 2020/21 are not on this site: for those years the UGC published separate cut-off lists for old-syllabus and new-syllabus candidates, which cannot be shown honestly as one cut-off per year. 2017/18 is not included because no official copy of its list is available. The 2021/22 list on this site is the UGC's list based on results before re-scrutiny, as printed on that document. The UGC cut-off lists do not give faculties, and the handbook lists several courses as open to students from different subject streams, so the site shows neither faculty nor stream. Admissions on special grounds (handbook Section 6) are not covered.
Disclaimer
This tool compares your Z-score with the minimum Z-scores (cut-off marks) published by the University Grants Commission (UGC) for previous academic years. Cut-off marks change every year, so a course shown as 'Safe' is not a guarantee of selection, and a course shown as 'Missed' is not a final decision. Always follow the official UGC admission handbook for the current year. This website is not affiliated with the UGC or the Department of Examinations.