Percentage vs Percentile

Percentage is about the marks you score expressed out of 100. Say you scored 40 marks out of 50, when it is expressed in percentage, it is 80 percentage.

Percentile has nothing to do with marks. It is a relative ranking mechanism. Percentile expresses the number of students in percentage who are behind you.

Or in short, if your percentile is 95, it just means 95 percentage of all students who took the exam are behind you in terms of ranking. It also means you are in the top 5 percentage of students.

How To Calculate Percentile in an Exam?

If 45000 candidates wrote the exam in total, and if your all India rank is 1000, then –

the way to calculate percentile is to find how many people are behind you in this exam.

The number of people behind you is 45000-1000 = 44000.

So Percentile is worked out as follows : (No. of people behind you)/(Total Candiates) * 100.

ie. 44000/45000 = 97.7 percentile.

Percentile Requirement in various exams:

If the seats are limited (say only 1000), and if the number of candidates writing the exam are very huge (say 2,00,000), then you will need high percentile above 99.5 to get into any of those 1000 seats. This doesn’t mean you need marks/score of above 99.5. For tough exams like CAT, even a total percentage near to 50 can at times take your percentile to 99+.