How to calculate GATE percentile

As everyone knows GATE scores are used for M.Tech (other master degrees in Engineering) and percentiles tells you where you stand. Please don’t confuse yourself with percentage.

Percentile is a relative term and tells where you stand in a set of people. For example, if you have 99.95 percentile in GATE means that your score or marks are above 99.95% student who took GATE exam.

Whereas, percent is a relative and measured on the scale of 100, it means that how many marks you got out of 100. This is not a measure of GATE performance. Therefore, don’t worry if someone says you that they go 99.9X score and think that it is beyond your capacity. To answer how to find GATE percentile please read the below formula and example carefully.

The GATE percentile is calculated as follows:

P = ( (N- your rank)/ N) x 100

Where P is percentile and N is total number of candidates appeared for exam.
(N- Your rank) indicates the number of candidates who have scored less marks than you.

For example, if total number of candidates are 100 and 90 of them have less marks than you P = (09/100)X100 = 0.9×100 = 90 percentile.

For another example: A guy form Mechanical Engineering have All India Rank (AIR) 99 and total number of student of students appeared for GATE in Mechanical Engineering are 59338 in 2010. Then his percentile would be calculated as

P = ((59338-99)/ 59338) X 100
= (59239/59338) X 100
= (0.9983) X 100
= 99.83
The candidate has 99.83 percentile.

As the competition grown too high, refer to GATE 2010 analysis, percentile not used for admissions anymore. As score is calculated on 1000 scale it gives a bit clear understanding and make admission process easy. Therefore Score is taken into consideration these days. Please refer to what is valid GATE Score to know more about GATE Scores. Do check for more information of GATE and M.Tech Admissions.

I m planing to write an automated online program to calculate GATE 2011 percentile. If you still have any questions please feel free to drop a comment.