How much does your reservation category actually move your KCET cutoff?
Published 5 August 2026
Two students, same college, same branch, same counselling round — and their “cutoff” can look nothing alike. That’s not an error; it’s how Karnataka’s eight-category reservation system is designed to work. Here’s what the actual gap looks like with real numbers, not just the general explanation.
The real example: RVCE, Computer Science, 2025
At RV College of Engineering’s Computer Science & Engineering programme in the 2025 KCET cycle, the reported closing ranks were:
- General Merit (GM): ~234–500, settling at 499 by the final round
- Scheduled Caste (SC): reported in the ~3,000–6,000 range
That’s a roughly 6–12x gap, at the exact same college, same branch, same year. A GM candidate needs to be in the top 500 statewide for that seat; an SC candidate has a meaningfully larger window. Neither number is “wrong” — they’re two separate merit lists KEA maintains in parallel, each filling its own reserved share of the same seats. See the full reservation breakdown for how the eight categories (GM, 2A, 2B, 3A, 3B, SC, ST, Category-1) split the seat pool.
Why the gap is so much smaller at PGCET
Compare that to PGCET’s MCA cutoff at the same college (RVCE), same year: GM closed at rank 51, while 3AG closed at 67 and 2AG at 93 — all within roughly 2x of each other, not 6-12x. The difference isn’t that PGCET’s reservation percentages are smaller; it’s that PGCET’s total applicant pool is a small fraction of KCET’s lakhs-strong pool. With fewer total applicants, every category’s merit list is shorter, so the absolute rank numbers across categories end up closer together even though the underlying seat-share percentages work similarly.
The practical takeaway
Don’t compare your rank directly against a friend’s or a forum post’s rank without checking you’re in the same category. And don’t assume a percentage gap you’ve read about (like “SC gets 15% of seats”) tells you how far apart the actual closing ranks will be — that depends heavily on how large the applicant pool is for that specific exam, which is why KCET and PGCET category gaps look so different in practice even though both use the same eight-category framework.
Where to go next
- KCET cutoff ranks: the fuller branch-wise and category data behind this post
- How KCET reservation actually works: the percentage breakdown by category
- Glossary: what GM, 2A, 2B, 3A, 3B, SC, ST and Category-1 each mean