During class 8-th to class 12-th, a student’s academic goals were to score a high percentage. Percentage was simply the marks scored as a percent of total marks of the paper. And we all understand percentage marks scored very clearly.
A slightly more ambitious goal was getting a higher Rank. To be amongst the top rankers i.e. rank 1, rank 2, rank 3, …. Thus, the goal shifted from an absolute percentage of marks scored to a relative one, performing better than the others.
And when one entered the field of competitive entrance exams, like CAT, a new term assaulted us – ‘percentile’. Apparently to get admission to the old IIMs one needed 99.5 percentile and above; to get admission to a decently good b-school one needed atleast 95 percentile. And thus began the chase of percentile. Not everyone understood CAT percentile calculation thoroughly, but the chase was on. Come August-September, all aspirants are busy discussing their percentile scored in CAT Mock Test Series.
What is a ‘percentile’?
While percentile is a statistical measure, let us start by understanding that it is just another way to express Rank. When the number of students in our class was just 30 or 50 or 60, it was easy enough to understand rank 1, rank 2, … rank 60. Obviously rank 60 wasn’t great, in-fact was the worst rank in a class of 60. But when one takes a popular competitive entrance exams, the number of test takers are in lacs … CAT test has around 2 lac test takers, JEE Mains is taken by around 12 lac aspirants, SSC CGL by around 24 lac students!!!
Obviously you will appreciate that a rank of 60 in a class of 60 students and a rank of 60 amongst lacs & lacs of test takers are two very different perspective.
Now, when the test takers are so very high, just telling that my rank is, say, 2145, does not really tell the complete picture. And even if you mention that the rank of 2145 is out of a total of 2,00,000 test-takers, yet it is not crystal clear how good an achievement this is. When this is converted into a percentage of all test takers i.e. 2145/200000 * 100 i.e. 1.0725%, we start getting an idea of how good the 2145 rank is. It is ‘ranking’ in the top 1.0725% of all test takers.
Once you understand this, percentile calculation is just one step away. Instead of converting the rank into ‘top 1.0725%’, we convert it into how many aspirants have been ‘left behind’. So if Sharma-ji was ranked 2145 out of 2,00,000 CAT test takers, it would mean Sharma-ji has left behind 2,00,000 – 2,145 = 1,97,855 test takers. And this as a percentage of all test takers is 197855/200000 * 100 = 98.9275%. This is Sharma-ji’s CAT exam percentile.
How to calculate CAT Percentile
As seen above, percentile is just another way to express a ‘rank’, atleast as far as entrance exams go. That percentile is a statistical measure, similar to median or quartile or decile … let us not bother with it right now and leave it for studying in a Statistics course at a B-school.
And to arrive at a rank, we need some measure using which we will ‘arrange’ all students in an order … descending or ascending order. And this measure is your CAT score. When you take CAT, you are rewarded 3 marks for each correct answer and penalised 1 negative mark for incorrect answer. And you end up with a CAT score.
All students are then ordered, arranged, in ascending or descending order of their scores … this is exactly same as finding the rank. And after the ordering is done, the number of test takers who have a lesser score than you is found. This number is then divided by the total number of test takers and viola, your percentile is reached.
In as few words as possible, percentile gives “the percentage of test takers you have left behind”
These days, since exams happen over many different slots, not everyone taking the same test paper, hence instead of using the score directly to do the ranking process, first the score is converted to a scaled score … to take account of minor differences in difficulty levels across slots. This scaling is a elaborate statistical procedure, not in scope of this article. But if you want to read about scaling, you can do it at LINK>>
CAT score to Percentile Calculator
The official website of CAT gives a link to Percentile Score Calculation. Check this https://cdn.digialm.com/per/g01/pub/756/EForms/CAT23/Percentile_Score_Calculation_2023.pdf
The steps involved are
1. Total the number of all test takers, across all three slots, say N
2. Assign a rank to each test taker, based on scaled scores.
E.g. If scaled scores of A, B, C, D, E are 85, 72, 60, 80 and 72, then arranged in descending order, we have A > D > B = E > C; and the ranks of A, D, B, E, C will be 1, 2, 3, 3, 5. Please note that B and E have same scaled scores and hence same rank of 3. But C is not 4 and is 5th because there are 4 students scoring better than her. Say a student’s rank is r.
3. Calculate the percentile (P) of the student ranked r as
CAT Score and Percentile
Now, that you know 99 percentile means 99% of test takers have been left behind, don’t confuse it with scoring a very high percentage of marks in the test. Tough competitive exams like CAT have a time limit such that it is totally unrealistic that anyone can solve, say even 80-90% of all questions. In CAT, scoring just about 100 marks out of 198 marks i.e. 50% of marks is enough to get 99+ percentile. While CAT does not officially disclose the marks-percentile data, the following is found by analysing the score-cards of students in CAT 2022.
| VARC | DILR | QA | Overall | ||||
| Percentile | Marks | Percentile | Marks | Percentile | Marks | Percentile | Marks |
| 99.9 | 48 | 99.9 | 39 | 99.9 | 47 | 99.9 | 110 |
| 99 | 40 | 99 | 29 | 99 | 33 | 99 | 84 |
| 95 | 29 | 95 | 19 | 95 | 22 | 95 | 60 |
| 90 | 24 | 90 | 16 | 90 | 17 | 90 | 48 |
CAT Expected Percentile
Application to colleges is a costly matter these days and one needs to apply to a carefully chosen list of colleges such that you don’t end up wasting money and neither do you lose out on good colleges. To do so, it will be beneficial that you have a reasonably accurate idea of your expected percentile, so that you can judiciously select the colleges to apply to. If you are subscribed to any popular Test Series and are scoring around 90%tiles, you can expect upto 5%tile more in actual CAT; and if you are already scoring 95%tile,
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