What is NTA Score in JEE Main?

NTA Score is the percentile score assigned to each JEE Main candidate. It is NOT raw marks. NTA Score ranges from 0 to 100 and is normalized across sessions. A higher NTA Score means you outperformed more candidates. Your rank is determined by your NTA Score, not raw marks.

Understanding Your JEE Main Scorecard

When you download your JEE Main scorecard from jeemain.nta.nic.in, you will see two distinct types of scores: Raw Marks (actual marks out of 300) and NTA Score (percentile). Here is what each means:

Score Type	What It Is	Range	Used For
Raw Marks	Actual marks scored (+4/−1 scheme)	−75 to 300	Not used for ranking
NTA Score (Overall)	Percentile across all candidates	0 to 100	All India Rank
NTA Score (Physics)	Physics percentile in your session	0 to 100	Tie-breaking
NTA Score (Chemistry)	Chemistry percentile in your session	0 to 100	Tie-breaking
NTA Score (Mathematics)	Maths percentile in your session	0 to 100	Tie-breaking (first)

Why Raw Marks Don't Directly Determine Your Rank

JEE Main is held across multiple sessions with different question papers. To maintain fairness, NTA uses normalization — a statistical process that accounts for variation in difficulty across sessions. The NTA Score (percentile) is the output of this normalization.

For example: if Session 1 was harder than Session 2, a student scoring 170 in Session 1 might get a higher NTA Score than a student scoring 180 in Session 2, because fewer people scored 170+ in the harder session.

NTA Score and JEE Advanced Cutoff

The cutoff for JEE Advanced qualification is announced in terms of NTA Score (percentile). For JEE Advanced 2026, the top 2,50,000 candidates from JEE Main are eligible. The cutoff NTA Score varies by category: typically 88–90 percentile for General, 72–75 for OBC-NCL, 52–55 for SC, and 44–48 for ST.

How NTA Score is Reported

NTA Scores are reported up to 7 decimal places for precision (e.g., 98.3456789). This level of precision is necessary to differentiate between candidates with very similar performances and is used in tie-breaking calculations. On your official scorecard, you may see truncated or rounded values.