CAT 2025 Expected Score vs Percentile - Check the Score Required for 90, 95 and 99 Percentiles
Table of Content
-
- + more items Show less
The CAT 2025 exam is now over and many students are wondering what actually counts as a “good” score this year. Since the difficulty level and competition change every cycle there’s no fixed number that fits everyone. CAT scores are used by all 21 IIMs and several top non-IIM colleges but each institute has its own cutoff.
For most top B-schools strong raw scores usually fall in a certain range before being converted into percentiles which decide your position among all test-takers. These percentiles matter more than the raw score itself.
If you have appeared in the 2025 CAT exam and are trying to understand what your score means or whether it’s enough for your dream college this guide will help you understand it.

What Is a Good CAT Score for 2025?
The candidates CAT score is the number of marks they get in the test. CAT has three sections VARC, DILR and QA which have a total of sixty eight questions making a maximum of 193 marks.
Candidates get plus three marks for every correct answer and plus one mark for every wrong answer. No marks will be cut for the questions that are not aswered as there is no negative marking in the exam. Using this the raw CAT score is calculated as -
CAT Score = (Correct Answers × 3) – (Incorrect Answers × 1)
Many students especially beginners often ask what score can be considered “good”. The truth is that it depends on the exam difficulty and the MBA colleges you are targeting. All 21 IIMs and many top non-IIM business schools accept CAT scores but each college has its own cutoffs.
In simple terms a “good” score changes for each person because everyone has different college goals. Generally 110 to 120 is considered very good and above 100 often places you around the 95 percentile or higher. Below is the expected CAT score range for 2025 CAT exam.
Expected Good CAT Score 2025
What is a good CAT percentile for 2025?
CAT percentile is what tells a candidate about his or her relative performance among all candidates. For example a 99 percentile signifies that a candidate has scored higher than 99 percent of test-takers.
The percentile depends on -
N = Total number of candidates
r = Your rank based on scaled scores

Expected Good Percentile 2025
Number of Good Attempts in CAT 2025
CAT 2025 Expected Cutoff
The cutoff percentiles of 2025 CAT exam for test takers as expected from the 2024 CAT exam are given below. The list can be checked for reference by the students.

Expected 2025 CAT VARC Score vs Percentile
Following are the predictions based on past year trends and difficulty level of the 2025 CAT exam. They show what VARC score a candidate may need for every different percentile.
Expected 2025 CAT DILR Score vs Percentile
The predicted DILR score needed for different percentiles based on past year trends are given below for the reference of the candidates.
Expected 2025 CAT QA Score vs Percentile
Based on CAT trends and the difficulty level the predicted quantitative score needed for each percentile is shown here.
