How is NEET percentile calculated?
NEET is, without doubt, the most competitive exam in India. Every year lakhs and lakhs of aspirants take part in this competition to get a medical seat. The students who succeed in NEET get admission to medical colleges all over India. One can get admission to MBBS course, BDS course, BHMS, BAMS, Ayush courses and BPT courses etc, based on their NEET score.
NTA sets the paper and also lays the ground rules and mode of delivery of results. It becomes essential for candidates to know terms like ‘Qualifying score’, ‘cutoff’ and ‘percentile’. I hope you all know that ‘percentile’ is different from ‘percentage’, your percentile score does not indicate your score. Let us not understand how percentiles are calculated.
NEET Percentile Calculation
NEET percentile can be calculated as follows:
NEET Percentile Calculation – Based On Rank
To calculate the percentile score, we need to know two important parameters.
- Your NEET rank, and
- Total Number of candidates appearing for NEET in that particular year
NEET Percentile is then calculated as
NEET Percentile= [(Total no. of candidates appearing – NEET Rank) /Total no. of candidates appearing] x 100
This can be explained with the help of an example, take a look:
If a student A has secured a rank of 1000 and 25,00,000 candidates appeared in NEET that year, then the percentile of A can be calculated as follows:
NEET Percentile = [(25,00,000 – 100) /25,00,000] x 100 = 99.996
This Percentile can be interpreted as: Student A performed better than 99.996% of the participants.
It is clear from the formula that percentile is a relative performance indicator. It gives you an idea of where you stood in the competition. The closest parameter to percentile is ‘All India Rank’ and not ‘NEET score’.
I hope it is now clear to all that a 98th percentile does not indicate a 98% score or 710/720 marks. Instead it tells you that you performed better than 98 of the candidates.
Why is percentile important?
As mentioned above, even if you have scored above 600, say 630 marks. But, if the competition is fierce and most students are scoring more than 630, then your relative performance goes down. You might have a good accuracy, meaning you have solved a good 87% of the paper correctly, but your percentile might not get you a seat.
Even if your percentile is above 90th, it is not guaranteed that you might get a seat. Considering the intense competition, if 25 lakh students are appearing for NEET then a 90th percentile indicates an AIR of around 2.5 lakhs. A 2.5 lakh rank will not get you an MBBS seat in a government college.
