Common Admission Test, CAT 2025 answer key will be released soon. Indian Institute of Management, IIM Kozhikode has successfully conducted the management admission test on November 30, 2025. The answer key will be released on the official website iimcat.ac.in.
Over the past few years, CAT answer keys have been released within a week of the examination. Based on trends, it can be suggested that CAT answer key may be released by 4th or 5th of December. Nearly 3 lakh candidates have appeared for the CAT examination this year.
Here is a quick look at how the CAT scores are calculated.
Also Check | CAT 2026: Top 10 Non-IIM MBA Colleges of India
CAT 2025 Score Calculation
Since the examination is conducted in multiple shifts, the final scores are normalized and adjusted to scale. This is done to ensure fairness in the result. The method of normalization is applied by most of the top tier examination in the country.
What it means is that one candidate may have scored 80 per cent marks by in normalization process, he/she may actually have a higher percentile rank than another candidate individual who has scored 81% marks.
Calculating Raw Scores
The raw score calculation is pretty simple. For the same, all the correct responses are multiplied by 3 and summed. From this sum, number of wrong questions is deducted (-1) for negative marking. The total score is then the raw score.
However, that is not how the score will be tallied and converted to percentile. These scores will be first converted into scaled scores and then converted into percentile. This would be done for all individual sections and then summed to achieve the final scaled score. These would then be converted into sectional percentiles as well as overall percentile.
Calculating Scaled scores
Complete calculation formula has been shared by IIM Kozhikode. To put it simply, the scaled scores are the sums of the mean and standard deviation of various shifts computed against the overall mean and standard deviation sum and their difference from the mean of top 0.1% scores. These are computed for various shifts and for different sections.
So, for a student who has scored a raw score of R in a section, the scaled score R` would be given as,
Where,
G1 = M1 + S1
M1 = Mean of all raw scores in that session in that section
S1 = Standard Deviation of raw scores in that session in that section
G = Sum of Mean of All Raw Scores Across Sessions for the section and Standard Deviation of these raw scores in the section across sessions
M0.1 = Mean raw score of top 0.1% scores in that section across sessions
M0.11 = Mean raw score of top 0.1% scores in that section in that session
Once these scaled scores are computed, they would then be converted to percentile.
CAT Score: Raw Score to Percentile
Since a candidate cannot possibly know the marks or raw scores of all candidates who appeared for a particular session, there is no way to accurately computer scaled/ percentile scores.
Experts, however, using predictive modelling, are able to share a tentative percentile rank based on raw scores expected. Candidates can check the raw score vs percentile predictions to ascertain their chances of scoring well in CAT exam.