If you do not attempt anything at all, your score will be "0". Now CAT has 3 sections. The Verbal Ability section and Reading Comprehension has 34 Questions, Data interpretation-Logical Reasoning section has 32 MCQ questions and Quantitative Ability has 34 MCQ questions totalling up to 100 questions. Each Question has 3 marks and a wrong answer takes away 1 mark. There are also Non MCQs which do not have negative marking. This answer is being written by taking QA sections as an example.

• Calculating the no.of Candidates who appeared for CAT
• Assigning ranks based on the CAT score
• For example if 2 people scored 20 marks and got the rank 120, the next Candidate will get the rank 122
• Calculate the percentile using the formula:  P = (N−r)/N × 100
• And the percentile is rounded off to the nearest number

Now because CAT is an online exam, you cannot submit an empty or unanswered question paper. But because you have to answer atleast one question to submit the exam, lets say you attempted a non MCQ and it turned out to be a wrong question, it doesn't make any difference. And that means 0 marks. Now the truth is most students fail to score positive marks. Which means their score might be like -20, -10 so on and so forth. When compared to these marks, 0 is a better number. Statistics state that atleast 40-50% of Candidates fail to score positive score which means even if you do not score anything, but because 0 is better than -10 or -20, you still manage to get 40-50 percentile as your score.

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Yasir, we shall try answering as to how are percentiles calculated in CAT. Now CAT has 3 sections. The Verbal Ability section and Reading Comprehension has 34 Questions, Data interpretation-Logical Reasoning section has 32 MCQ questions and Quantitative Ability has 34 MCQ questions totalling up to 100 questions. Each Question has 3 marks and a wrong answer takes away 1 mark. There are also Non MCQs which do not have negative marking. This answer is being written by taking QA sections as an example.

• Calculating the no.of Candidates who appeared for CAT
• Assigning ranks based on the CAT score
• For example if 2 people scored 20 marks and got the rank 120, the next Candidate will get the rank 122
• Calculate the percentile using the formula:  P = (N−r)/N × 100
• And the percentile is rounded off to the nearest number

Now because CAT is an online exam, you cannot submit an empty or unanswered question paper. But because you have to answer atleast one question to submit the exam, lets say you attempted a non MCQ and it turned out to be a wrong question, it doesn't make any difference. And that means 0 marks. Now the truth is most students fail to score positive marks. Which means their score might be like -20, -10 so on and so forth. When compared to these marks, 0 is a better number. Statistics state that atleast 40-50% of Candidates fail to score positive score which means even if you do not score anything, but because 0 is better than -10 or -20, you still manage to get 40-50 percentile as your score.