How We Calculate Every Score
Every number on College Buddha is either a real citation or an estimate — never presented as one when it’s the other. This page says exactly which is which.
Sourced
Entered as a citation at data-entry time — NIRF rank strings, cutoffs, fees, ratings. Only as accurate as the entry itself (there is no live feed behind it), but it is not computed; it’s a fact someone recorded.
Estimated
Calculated in the browser from the sourced fields, deterministically — the same college always gets the same number, never randomized. Reasonable for comparing colleges at a glance. Never a substitute for a real survey, ledger, or audit.
The 5-dimension comparison radar
Shown on /compare. All five are estimated composites — there is no independent survey behind any of them.
Placement Rate
A composite score, not a real placement survey.
Built from the college’s rating and its NIRF rank (if it has one), plus a small fixed spread per college so scores don’t all cluster together.
Fee Affordability
How cheap this college is relative to the others you’ve selected right now.
The cheapest college in your current comparison always scores 100; the rest are scaled down from there. Add or remove a college and every affordability score recalculates — it is intentionally relative, not absolute.
Campus Life
A composite score — there is no campus-life survey behind this.
Built from the college’s rating plus a small fixed spread per college.
NIRF Reputation
Derived from the college’s real NIRF rank, run through a curve so #1 and #10 don’t look nearly identical.
Colleges with no parsed NIRF rank get a flat mid-range score rather than a zero, so being unranked doesn’t read as “bad.”
Infrastructure
A composite score, not a facilities audit.
Built from how long ago the college was founded (older institutions get a modest boost) plus a small fixed spread per college.
“Est. Placement Package”
Shown on /compare and on college cards. Estimated — it is not a placement-cell figure.
Built from the college’s rating and NIRF rank (higher rating and a stronger rank push it up), plus a small fixed spread per college. It is a rough, order-of-magnitude stand-in — useful for “which of these four looks stronger,” not for financial planning. Every place it’s shown, the caption says “estimated average, composite figure” — that label is not decorative.
Admission predictor odds
Shown on /predictor. Estimated — a rules-based heuristic, not a model trained on real historical admissions outcomes.
1. We read the college’s cutoff.
Cutoffs are stored as free text (e.g. “JEE-Advanced Cut off 403”). We extract the last number found in that string. For colleges where that number doesn’t parse cleanly, or where the field is empty, we fall back to a flat estimate based only on how strong your score is in absolute terms.
2. We adjust it for your reservation category.
OBC-NCL, SC, ST, and EWS each relax the effective cutoff by a fixed amount before comparing it to your score — this mirrors how real reservation categories work directionally, but the exact amounts are our own estimate, not each college’s published category-wise cutoff.
3. We compare your score to that adjusted cutoff.
The further above the cutoff you are, the higher the probability; the further below, the lower — with different math depending on whether the exam reports a rank, a score, or a percentile.
4. Home-state colleges get a bonus.
If you enter a domicile state and it matches the college’s state, the probability gets a flat boost, reflecting (loosely) home-state quota seats.
Tiers
80+ is labeled “High Match,” 50–79 “Moderate Match,” below 50 “Dream / Low Match.” These thresholds are editorial choices, not statistical cutoffs.
College card badges
Shown on college cards across the site.
✓ Verified
Not a real verification yet. Today this badge just means the college’s rating is 4.6 or higher — a heuristic threshold, not proof of anything. We show it labeled honestly here rather than pretend it means more. A real verified-student-review system (admission proof required to leave a review) is planned; when it ships, this badge will mean that instead, and this page will say so.
🏅 NIRF Top Rank
Sourced rank, editorial threshold. We parse the number out of the college’s rankingInfo field (a real NIRF citation) and show this badge for anything ranked 10th or better — the rank itself is sourced, the “top 10” cutoff is our own editorial choice.
The underlying rule: no score, badge, or ranking ships without a row here explaining it. If you find one that isn’t explained, it’s a bug — treat it as unverified until it’s added.