Dear Jitesh, a percentile means the percentage of people who scored lesser than you. So, when we say 80 percentile,it means that you should do better than 80 percentile of the Candidates who appeared for the exam with you. It is difficult to define a percentile because we do not know how many people will appear for the exam and how would the scores be. IIM Kozikhode has released the steps for calculating the percentile for IIMs. QA has been taken as an example but this also can be applied fpr other sections as well.

Step 1: Calculate the total number of candidates (N) who appeared for CAT  including both morning and afternoon sessions.

Step 2: Assign a rank (r), based on the scaled scores obtained in the QA section, to all candidates who appeared for CAT. In the case of two or more candidates obtaining identical scaled scores in the QA section, assign identical ranks to all those candidates. As an example,  suppose exactly two candidates obtain the highest scaled score in the QA section, then both of those candidates are assigned a rank of 1. Moreover, the candidate obtaining the second highest scaled score in the QA section are assigned a rank of 3 and so on.

Step 3: Calculate the percentile score (P) of a candidate with rank (r) in the QA section as:
P= (N-r)/N 100

Step 4: Round off the calculated percentile score (P) of a candidate up to two decimal points. For example all percentile scores greater than or equal to 99.995 are rounded off to 100, all percentile scores greater than or equal to 99.985 but strictly less than 99.995 are rounded off to 99.99 and so on.

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