Which Top Colleges Accept CAT Scores? What Is CAT Score Versus Percentile?

MBA is a competitive and popular course in India. Students look forward to pursuing this course to excel in their professional careers. Studying MBA from reputed colleges holds a good value in corporate circles. We will look into some of the top colleges accepting students based on their Common Admission Test (CAT) scores.

There is a major difference between CAT score and percentile. Students are selected based on their CAT percentiles. The scoring includes scaling and normalization. The normalization assures the students of fairness in the scoring of the exam.

Top colleges accepting CAT scores

The CAT exam is not only to select students for the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). Various colleges all over India accept CAT scores to select students in their colleges. However, before getting to know about the colleges, let us understand the major differences between CAT scores and CAT percentiles.

  • The CAT score is the total marks scored by the candidate in the exam as per the marking scheme. The CAT score is not used by colleges to select students. Multiple choice questions (MCQs) carry 3 marks for every correct answer and -1 for every incorrect answer, whereas there are no negative marks for non-MCQ questions.


  • The CAT percentile is a number under which a certain percentage of students fall. For example, if a student scores 85 percentile, that means, 85% of students have scored below this student.

Let us look at the process of calculating the CAT percentile.

  • Determine the number of students (n) who have appeared for the exam.
  • Provide a rank (r) based on the scores in the question-answer (QA) section of the paper. If two or more students have achieved the same marks, they would be given the same rank.
  • Determine the percentile of the candidate with the rank (r) in the QA section using the following formula: P = (nr)/n x 100.
  • Round-off the calculated percentile to two decimal points.
  • This similar calculation is used to calculate the percentile for other sections of the exam in CAT.

Colleges select the students based on their CAT percentiles. The students need to come under the bracket of a higher percentile to get admission to good colleges. Apart from IIMs, various colleges select students based on their CAT percentiles. Let us look at the colleges accepting students based on their CAT scores.

Sl. No.College NameNIRF Ranking
1IIT Delhi5
2Management Development Institute, Gurugram 11
3National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Mumbai12
4S.P. Jain Institute of Management & Research, Mumbai19
5Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai24
6Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, Delhi25
7International Management Institute, Delhi26
8ICFAI Foundation, Hyderabad27
9Amity University, Noida29
10KIIT School of Management, Bhubaneswar31
11T.A. Pai Management, Manipal32
12Xavier Institute, Bhubaneswar34
13Chitkara University, Chandigarh54
14Loyola Institute of Business Administration, Chennai65
15Welingkar Institute, Mumbai72

Apart from these top colleges, various colleges select students based on their CAT scores. 

With BYJU’S Exam Prep, students can prepare for the CAT exam with their practice papers, model sample papers, online classes by the experts, and the updated CAT mock tests prepared by the experts. 

Conclusion

With the rising competition in the corporate world, many students are looking to pursue MBA from reputed universities to excel in their professional careers. There are limited seats in IIMs, however, there are equally good colleges that select students based on their CAT scores. The BYJU’S Exam Prep with their exclusive online classroom programs by experts, unlimited mock tests, teaching videos for concept clearing, access to previous year papers, and free quizzes after every topic would help students prepare for the CAT exam.

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