Data source
Every figure comes from the Medical Counselling Committee (MCC) All-India-Quota (AIQ) seat-allotment results, published as PDFs after each counselling round. We parse the allotment lists, match each row to a canonical college and course, and keep only merit (open and reserved-category) allotments.
Coverage
MDS spans 2021–2025, drawing on Round 1, MOP-UP and stray-vacancy rounds across those years. BDS spans 2022–2025, similarly across Round 1, MOP-UP and stray rounds.
One caveat worth stating plainly: MDS 2025 is stray-round-only. A stray round fills leftover seats and reaches much deeper than Round 1, so any 2025 MDS closing rank is a weak signal. We keep it for completeness but treat it as lower confidence — and the more years a college has, the more its estimate leans on the stabler earlier rounds.
What a “closing rank” means
For each college, course, category and year we take the worst (highest) merit rank admitted across all of that year’s rounds. That is the closing rank: the last person who got in by merit. A larger number means the seat reached further down the merit list.
How the estimate is computed
For a given college / course / category we combine the per-year closing ranks into a single estimate:
- Recency-weighted average. Recent years count for more — each
year is weighted by
1 / (latestYear − year + 1), so last year matters most and older years taper off. - Outlier dampening. When four or more years are available, the single most extreme year (furthest from the median) is dropped before averaging, so one freak round does not distort the estimate. With fewer than four years nothing is dropped.
- Confidence. An estimate is high confidence with four or more years and low year-to-year variation, low with a single year or very high variation, and medium otherwise. Confidence is shown on every result.
Safe, Likely, Reach
Your rank is compared to the estimated closing rank for each seat:
- Safe — your rank is at or below 0.85× the estimate.
- Likely — your rank is at or below 1.0× the estimate.
- Reach — your rank is at or below 1.15× the estimate.
Beyond 1.15× the seat is not shown for that rank. The bands are deliberately fuzzy: they reflect that next year’s cut-off will not exactly match the past.
Category migration
Reserved-category candidates can be admitted on an open (GN) seat if their merit rank is good enough. So for a reserved-category user we evaluate both their own category seat and the GN seat, and keep whichever gives the better outcome. When the GN (open) seat is the one that fits, the result is flagged as reached “via open seat”. General-category users are evaluated on GN seats only.
What is excluded, and why
DentRank covers AIQ merit seats only. The following are deliberately left out, because they follow different rules, different rank scales, or are not published in a comparable way:
- Management / paid seats at deemed universities — allotted by a separate fee-driven process, not AIQ merit.
- NRI seats — a distinct quota with its own eligibility.
- Minority seats — reserved under minority-institution rules, not general AIQ merit.
- Institutional / university quotas — e.g. DU, BHU and AMU internal quota seats, which do not go through open AIQ merit.
- PwD horizontal-reservation spillover. PwD is a horizontal reservation that cuts across categories; its spillover rows do not map cleanly onto a single category column and are dropped to avoid misleading cut-offs.
- Pre-NEET years. Older admissions used different, non-comparable rank scales, so they are not included.
The bottom line
These are statistical estimates from past data, not guarantees. Cut-offs move every year with seat counts, reservation changes and how many people sit the exam. Use DentRank to build a sensible shortlist — then confirm everything against the official MCC counselling for the current year.